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413 points martinald | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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Volundr ◴[] No.46205257[source]
FTA

> I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool. This would take me, or many developers I know and respect, days to write by hand.

I have no problem believing that Claude generated 300 passing tests. I have a very hard time believing those tests were all well thought out, consise, actually testing the desired behavior while communicating to the next person or agent how the system under test is supposed to work. I'd give very good odds at least some of those tests are subtly testing themselves (ex mocking a function, calling said function, then asserting the mock was called). Many of them are probably also testing implementation details that were never intended to be part of the contract.

I'm not anti-AI, I use it regularly, but all of these articles about how crazy productive it is skip over the crazy amount of supervision it needs. Yes, it can spit out code fast, but unless your prepared to spend a significant chunk of that 'saved" time CAREFULLY (more carefully than with a human) reviewing code, you've accepted a big drop in quality.

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1. insane_dreamer ◴[] No.46214506[source]
Experience from 2 days ago:

I had CC write a bunch of tests to make sure some refactoring didn't break anything, and then I ran the app and it crashed out of the gate. Why? Because despite the verbosity of the tests it turns out that it had mocked the most import parts to test, so the _actual_ connections weren't being tested, and while CC was happy to claim victory with all tests green, the app was broken.