Should QA exist?

I think the unstated (but highly prevalent) view among executives in large swathes of this industry is that they don't really care to spend any time or money on user testing or quality assurance, and if this role exists at companies it is usually under-compensated and straddles both these functions to have some party be accountable. It is sometimes a check on product teams and vision-driven executive teams who don't prototype/test their ideas (or empower their teams to do so), and sometimes a check on engineers and engineering managers who don't want to be accountable to gaps in quality.

If you care about: the consistency of your output, what you're selling to your customers, you have not much of a choice (than to control what you are shipping).

Not even mentioning the potential regulatory/market and legal consequences if you don't.

Developers are liars. Why would I trust them to test their software?

If your product is used by humans, then it needs to be tested by humans - this cannot be automated. Those humans can be your QA people, or your customers. Perhaps your customers are happy to be testers, perhaps not.

Unit tests are very expensive and return little value. Conversely, a (manual?) 'smoke test' is very cheap and returns great value - the first thing you do when updating a server for example is to check it still responds (and nothing has gone wrong in the deployment process), takes 2 seconds to do, prevents highly embarrassing downtime due to a misconfigured docker pull or whatever.

not really . but distill his knowledge into an OpenClaw.

Dumbest thing I ever read