alt Hacker NewsI agree with the author overall. Manual testing is what I call "vibe testing" and I think by itself is insufficient, no matter if you or the agent wrote the code. If you build your tests well, using the coding agent becomes smooth and efficient, and the agent is safe to do longer stretches of work. If you don't do testing, the whole thing is just a bomb ticking in your face.
My approach to coding agents is to prepare a spec at the start, as complete as possible, and develop a beefy battery of tests as we make progress. Yesterday there was a story "I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours". They had 9000+ tests. That was the secret juice.
So the future of AI coding as I see it ... it will be better than pre-2020, we will learn to spec and plan good tests, and the tests are actually our contract the code does what is supposed to do. You can throw away the code and keep the specs and tests and regenerate any time.
Replies
> Yesterday there was a story "I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours".
Yes, from the same author, in fact.
There are always unknown unknowns which a rigorous testing implementation would just hide under the rug (until they become visible on live, that is).
> They had 9000+ tests.
They were most probably also written by AI, there's no other (human) way. The way I see it we're putting turtles upon turtles hoping that everything will stick together, somehow.
This depends on the type of software you make. Testing the usability of a user interface for example, is something you can't automate (yet). So, ehm, it depends :)