Good post. I agree about the need to question things we held as true and go back to first principles. Since last year I’ve been questioning the need for unit tests. Why do we write them? I’d argue there are two main reasons: (1) make it easy to locate bugs and (2) provide proof that we are indeed making progress day to day. Do we still need them with coding agents? They are awesome at locating bugs from a stack trace, at least in programs with up to a few tens of thousands of loc; and they implement things extremely quickly. I’ve actually been removing unit tests in some code bases and instead put more emphasis on end to end tests. So far it’s worked well.
Good post. I agree about the need to question things we held as true and go back to first principles. Since last year I’ve been questioning the need for unit tests. Why do we write them? I’d argue there are two main reasons: (1) make it easy to locate bugs and (2) provide proof that we are indeed making progress day to day. Do we still need them with coding agents? They are awesome at locating bugs from a stack trace, at least in programs with up to a few tens of thousands of loc; and they implement things extremely quickly. I’ve actually been removing unit tests in some code bases and instead put more emphasis on end to end tests. So far it’s worked well.
That is a very interesting observation. I suspect you’re right. We are leaning more and more on evals, which is essentially e2e testing.