Comment by aliclark
3 hours ago
In my case it's not the CI that's the bottleneck. It's the human testing side. Does it work, sure. But does it actually do the thing we want (and more importantly) does it do it in a way our customers will understand and actually like?
I feel no one talks about this, and yet it is glaringly obvious. Are we even solving the right problem? No one cares. Push code. Number go up.
I feel like if anything LLMs have reduced coding/software to "throw as much as possible at the wall and see what sticks". It feels quite shortsighted and wasteful, especially considering that humanity needs to get better about how it produces and consumes energy. It's sort of bleak.
hasn't improved software either. it's made the overall quality worse if anything.
to me the last part if the most important part. product management hasn't been automated at all, and is more important than ever. you can't just keep adding features to make a great product
Think of it as a layered problem. If the bottom layer (CI) cannot keep up with the output of agents, then solving problems at a higher layer - like user experience checks - will be exponentially slower and less reliable. Kind of like how optimizing tight inner loops makes your whole program faster.
It's true because it usually makes no sense to QA test a build where the test suite has not yet passed.
Uh, no. If stage X is the bottleneck, it's immaterial how much you speed up stage Y.
You're assuming QA reviews won't be fully automated, and triggered from a CI pipeline.
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Clearly you have to replace obsolete human testers with agentic AI testers, duh.
At some point, with all this velocity, human users become the bottleneck, unable to keep up with and learn all the changes and new features. Luckily, there's a simple solution: just replace the human users with agentic AI users.
Maybe we can also replace the customers with agentic consumers.
> The forceful executive, Henry Ford II, and the leader of the automobile workers union, Walter Reuther, both saw many examples of advanced machinery operating at the plant. The words they exchanged brilliantly encapsulated the paradox of automation:
> Henry Ford II: Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?
> Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars/
I think you're being sarcastic, but there is actual truth behind what you're saying.
Because every developer is now a slop cannon by default, by default users will experience churn and whiplash, and things will break all over the place. As you point out, this is bad. It's also impossible to fix without deploying agents on the QA side. Like it or hate it, agentic testing is inevitable to protect users from the churn and noise caused by the slop cannon. I don't think that replaces test engineers at all - if anything it makes the job more fun. If you've ever had to keep playwright tests in sync with the target manually, and kept the CI environment up to speed with toolchain changes, you know what I mean.
Whether the "slop cannon by default" situation could have been avoided in the first place, is another question... But we're here now and there's no going back. Might as well deal with it as best as we can.
TLDR: it's not all bad :)