“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.
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.”
True, I do feel mocked by this code.