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Comment by icedchai | Hacker News Reader

I work with individuals who attempt to use LLMs to write tests. More than once, it's added nonsensical, useless test cases. Admittedly, humans do this, too, to a lesser extent.

Additionally, if their code has broken existing tests, it "fixes" them by not fixing the code under test, but changing the tests... (assert status == 200 becomes 500 and deleting code.)

Tests "pass." PR is opened. Reviewers wade through slop...

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The most annoying thing is that even after cleaning up all the nonsense, the tests still contain all sort of fanfare and it’s essentially impossible to get the submitter to trim them because it’s death by a thousand cuts (and you better not say "do it as if you didn’t use AI" in the current climate..)

Yep. We've had to throw PRs away and ask them to start over with a smaller set of changes since it became impossible to manage. Reviews went on for weeks. The individual couldn't justify why things were done (and apparently their AI couldn't, either!)

Luckily those I work with are smart enough that I've not seen a PR thrown away yet, but sometimes I'm approving with more "meh, it's fine I guess" than "yeah, that makes sense".

That’s also another thing. Sometimes the output is just junk, like there wasn’t really any intention behind the test to prevent a certain likely scenario arising

Sometimes it just add tests that lock in specific quirks of the code that weren’t necessarily intentional

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