“No Duh,” say senior developers everywhere.
The article explains that vibe code often is close, but not quite, functional, requiring developers to go in and find where the problems are - resulting in a net slowdown of development rather than productivity gains.
One of the guys at my old job submitted a PR with tests that basically just mocked everything, tested nothing. Like,
with patch("something.whatever", return_value=True): assert whatever(0) is True assert whatever(1) is TrueExcept for a few dozen lines, with names that made it look like they were doing useful.
He used AI to generate them, of course. Pretty useless.
True, I do feel mocked by this code.
We have had guys submit tests like that, long before AI was a thing.
At least in those situations, the person writing the tests knows they’re not testing anything…
Some do, some don’t, but more importantly: most just don’t care.
I had a tester wander into a set of edge cases which weren’t 100% properly handled and their first reaction was “gee, maybe I didn’t see that, it sounds like I’m going to have a lot more work because I did.”