Comment by movpasd

4 hours ago

This is significantly more thorough than any testing I've done, and in a totally different domain, but my anecdotal experience getting agents to use Hypothesis was quite poor.

The agent really, really struggled to bridge the gap between the code and the actual business rules it was meant to be modelling. It also struggled to work out which functions at which layer were appropriate to write tests for. So, its tests tended to be very brittle to changes to domain logic.

Essentially, agents have always seemed to struggle with modularity and problem decomposition. Good testing is about finding the right things to test, which means working out how to subdivide the input state into an appropriate product state, and checking each behaviour independently. IMO, this is the most difficult and complicated thing about programming, so I won't say it struggled _more_ than a human would --- but humans have the advantage of being able to sleep on it?

One minor thing I observed was that it tended to get really hung up on floating point edge cases (NaNs, infinities). Maybe floating point edge cases are over-represented in the property-testing training data, but it's essentially irrelevant for my usecase, at least as far as the business rules go.