Comment by CharlieDigital
5 hours ago
> I've asked them what their plan is when 500 of their 1000 test suddenly stop passing
That's not a terrible thing; would indicate that some shared behavior is broken and -- assuming well structured code -- hopefully easy to isolate the behavior.
Bigger problems to me are more practical: 1) large tests waste context both in and out, 2) large volume of tests waste CI cycles which are becoming the bottleneck.
IMO the solution to too many tests is to encode more things in the type system. If you can encode constraints like the length of an array in the type system you know it is correct if it compiles, and that is one less run-time test to run.
Agree, but this is not a pattern that is emergent from any coding agent I've used; it is only the result of explicit guidance to structure code in specific ways + relying on platform level analyzers.
But more specifically, I usually see the explosion of test code in integration tests where there is heavy setup of entity graphs.