“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.
Wrong tests will make you feel safe. And in the worst case, the next developer that is going to port the code will think that somebody wrote those tests with intention, and potentially create broken code to make the test green.
Exactly! I’ve seen plenty of tests where the test code was confidently wrong and it was obvious the dev just copied the output into the assertion instead of asserting what they expect the output to be. In fact, when I joined my current org, most of the tests were snapshot tests, which automated that process. I’ve pushed to replace them such with better tests, and we caught bugs in the process.
Then write comments in the tests that say they haven’t been checked.
That is indeed the absolute worst case though, and most of the tests that are so produced will be giving value because checking a test is easier than checking the code (this is kind of the point of tests) and so most will be correct.
The risk of regressions covered by the good tests is higher than someone writing code to the rare bad test that you’ve marked as suspicious because you (for whatever reason) are not confident in your ability to check it.