[lmm]

> The cost of restructuring has also gone down.

> The cost of shoring up behavior with tests ahead of a restructure has gone down because of AI.

Disagree. The growth in brittle AI-generated tests means restructuring is more costly than it was before. Pruning your test suite so that it tests the essence of the problem and not the incidental design decisions is something AIs aren't yet capable of.

[chowells]

Oh, it's worse than that. I've seen a rise in mutation testing, intended to ensure any change in implementation is caught by tests. Think about that for a moment. It's giving a fancy name to creating brittle tests than fail if any line of code is changed.

And this is seen as a good thing, because LLMs are really bad at confining their changes appropriately. Testing is really in a dark place right now.