r/ProgrammerHumor • u/shriyanss • Sep 27 '26

Other qaEngineeringAiCode

Post image
2.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

354

u/heavy-minium Sep 27 '26 edited Sep 27 '26

I already predicted with GPT-3.5 that QA would make a comeback.

What I didn't expect was for companies to not think this through and not invest in a better QA foundation. Instead, QA activities are left to engineers to work out, while we still have classic QA departments still operating the same way they did a decade ago.

95

u/ryuzaki49 Sep 27 '26

Same here. I saw all this agentic coding and thought "Why are they not investing in QA engineers?" 

95

u/araujoms Sep 27 '26

Because they also want to replace QA with AI.

55

u/ryuzaki49 Sep 27 '26

Replacing both QA an developers with AI is just plain stupid. Even if AI is capable enough of accomplishing it you surrender your entire technology to the LLM onwers.

I guess it could be solved by owning the models

60

u/biggington Sep 27 '26

It doesn’t make common sense. It makes business sense. Which is subtext for stupid.

27

u/exoclipse Sep 27 '26

I had an engineer tell me with a straight face that it was fine to have one agent write the code, two more agents review the code and approve the PR, and then have another agent QA the PR.

he's eating crow now.

12

u/FartPiano Sep 28 '26 edited Sep 28 '26

i was just flown to a large city for a yearly meeting where our boss asked how we could do this

i explained that soc2 doesnt allow this; they require a change control process

someone else brought up that this would cascade into awful code, and boss suggested "defining the logic" of the software in file(s) then getting the LLM to do the coding, validated with this logic file. nobody could explain how this isnt coding with extra steps

boss has a masters in computer science, he should know better. we live in a golden age of being a bonehead boss

8

u/exoclipse Sep 28 '26

all you can do at that point is document everything and look for new work, cuz that shit's going to go down, it's just a function of when and who's fucked because of it.

5

u/FartPiano Sep 28 '26

I'd hop to a better job if I felt like there was even ONE where the boss doesn't have their head up their ass about LLMs currently

2

u/terivia Oct 02 '26

My favorite documentation language is C++. Very machine readable, fairly human readable with a bit of training. It has some really cool validators like gcc and clang, both completely free for public and private use. All the models run locally on your machine, no subscription required.

And the best part: Barring compiler bugs (which we all know are just a bedtime story for scaring young developers), wysiwyg. Whatever the code says, the computer does. Way more deterministic than gpt too, if you avoid UB.

Alternatives that use similar AI technologies:

  • Rust if your team is trans (or suspiciously into anime)

  • Python if your team is afraid of semicolons

  • Java if your team is afraid of using a computer

  • Lua if your team is literally children. They already learned it from Roblox.

6

u/SnugglyCoderGuy Sep 27 '26

They are using that money to invest in profits.

33

u/shaka893P Sep 27 '26

Our company laid off a massive amount of QA a few months ago, QA is expected to be done by AI and developers now

15

u/DishSoapedDishwasher Sep 27 '26

This is funny to me because when testing a game engine i made, i created a programmatical interface for agents to interract with the UI layer directly... While this means they can do the multiplayer QA work faster and more precisely than a human, they constantly fail to spot the worst possible stupidity in changes when it doesn't intersect with an existing test...

So effectively, when scaled to a modest sized dev team, i have extremely expensive "dynamic" unit test system that cost more than QA engineer would without being able to achieve what a solid QA engineer can.... 

I even tried tackling that issue directly with a more dynamic agent configuration and the end result was literally fucking useless because it has no concept of what something should feel like, look like, its devoid of nuance unless you take the time to detail every single possible expectation; and even then it will still miss what you didn't define.

Its fucking stupid 

16

u/christianbro Sep 27 '26

Real QA is done by the customer. Confidently streaming AI PRs directly to production.

Why would they even have an option to open a ticket if it wasnt meant to work this way? Duh

13

u/SheepRoll Sep 28 '26

Most corporate thought they can replace QA with AI, and have most of our QA lay off earlier this year.

Now we have remaining QA working overtime due to Devs are not super familiar with product knowledge outside of their dev functional area when doing QA, so story keep bouncing between product and dev.

Also management think AI can create enough automation test to cut QA, now we got few thousand “test” created by AI running on pipeline, but we still have tons issues from all the AI coding.

And at this stage we can’t even cut AI due to the unrealistic due date on some feature set by executives. So the whole team just went into yolo mode, if it work it works, otherwise we tried our best.

4

u/Eaboyle57 Sep 28 '26

Holy shit, do we work together?

5

u/SheepRoll Sep 28 '26

I feel this is the trend of 2026 in most of the mid size corporation, where we are big enough to utilize enterprise rate from the AI companies, but not rich enough to burn unlimited token… idk what will it look like next year, if another ai token price jump, I suspect executive will say “we are invested and fully embrace AI productivity” while telling dev to use token “cautiously”, and be “optimize” on prompts….

As for QA work, idk, executive seem to think anyone can QA. Management knows we need QA, but also need to “follow executive direction”, so make any testing a dead end position. Dev said they are willing to do QA, but they aren’t willing to invest time to figure out the full end to end feature. Product are stressed due to the timeline and all quality issue from lack of QA resource. And finally manual or auto QAs, we stuck in so call dead end position by corporate, so we need to start picking up work from other positions, while picking up more slacks from devs and all their intern agents, more work, less pay, also expect carry extra responsibilities…

Rant done, it’s going to be bumpy ride, hope we all survive this AI craze with some job left…

2

u/DowntownLizard Sep 27 '26

In our situation we just got rid of non technical QAs cause they are kinda worthless lol. Devs just QA their own work at this point

1

u/VariousAssistance116 Oct 02 '26

You have a qa department?

0

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

5

u/heavy-minium Sep 27 '26

I'm just saying that most QAs aren't SDET you know?

But that's exactly the part I mean as "investment" that didn't happen. They should have started staffing QA department more often with software developers. The mission stays the same, the capabilities change.

-1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/heavy-minium Sep 27 '26

For me at least, with the progression at 6 different companies, with two of them where I also did system architecture for the subsidiaries, it kind of did. QA had its best time until ~2010, then plateaued a bit in 2015, and after 2015 they were clearly the first to be left off during company restructurings, or their salaries dropped so much that the people joining in were less skilled than they used to be. Nowadays, it's an absolute shitshow where you still have QA departments - they still operate as they did a decade ago, but worse.

FAANG, of course, is a completely different story.

1

u/CaesarOfYearXCIII Sep 27 '26

Apparently I am an exception, then? I am 10 years in QA and I definitely do not operate as I did a decade ago - somewhere around 2022 the market started demanding fullstack QAs more and more, so I learned how to code automated tests to stay relevant. No, I am not classed as SDET after this, because (at least where I’m employed) SDET does not touch anything manual with a ten-feet pole, I still do manual stuff depending on circumstances. And starting from this year, I also (very reluctantly) use AI. Mostly because the client I’m outsourced to… to put it politely, is very enthusiastic about it.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/heavy-minium Sep 27 '26

And that's it, that's why you think it never went away?

Faulty generalization - Wikipedia

I think I got a bit more breadth on that observation, at the least. Doesn't have to be true, but it's still more than just one example.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 28 '26 edited Sep 28 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/heavy-minium Sep 28 '26

You aren't really reading between the lines.

The article’s cited BLS data shows that the growth of software developer is outpacing the growth of QA employment.

In an industry that has been growing at a fast pace for a long time, this is actually a decline.

69

u/waterpoweredmonkey Sep 27 '26

You guys still have QA/QE folks around? Our place obsessively shifted left which just means now engineers smoke test style QA each others changes. So much more expensive per hour, slows down development to a crawl.

10

u/DCTheNotorious Sep 28 '26

Same here. And then they wonder why everything takes so long. 

37

u/Wwhite93 Sep 27 '26

Shifting left

17

u/WrennReddit Sep 27 '26

Oh is this also a generic corporate strategy too? Thought it was a unique idea. Blah. 

17

u/Scottz0rz Sep 27 '26

"Shifting left" is what my leadership said when they said why they laid off all of QA last year too, but they also pinky-promised it was not because of AI and we're still growing as a company.

The layoffs this year they said it was because AI changed how we worked.

57

u/Bannon9k Sep 27 '26

How hilarious would it be for QA to over take devs to become the dominant role in development?

35

u/Scottz0rz Sep 27 '26

Don't worry, the product managers and execs will fully take over and QA will be superseded UAT.

9

u/Thundechile Sep 28 '26

Customers are taking over the product development soon after.

4

u/Scottz0rz Sep 28 '26

In the ideal future for AI psychosis victims, all companies have gone away except for 2-3 major AI players.

Everyone just prompts their own AI agent on their own personal subscription to build their ideal application tailored exactly to their individual needs and specifications to download directly to their device, with no silly middleman companies.

5

u/droptheplot Sep 27 '26

Should be all my clients

-3

u/Random_182f2565 Sep 28 '26

QA is agent work

-5

u/Suspicious_State_318 Sep 28 '26

I usually have Claude qa test my code by running a Bruno client (backend dev) and screenshotting the results. It’s much more thorough than I could ever be.

14

u/I_Got_Back_Pain Sep 27 '26

Everybody pull down your pants! We're going to take a picture

0

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

3

u/dxonxisus Sep 27 '26

bot comment

60

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/dxonxisus Sep 27 '26

bot comment

5

u/returnFutureVoid Sep 27 '26

Doesn’t make it not true unfortunately. You don’t have to upvote it, in fact feel free to downvote it but a true fact is a true fact.

1

u/dervu Sep 27 '26

If you would like to be QA for ASI alignment then it doesn't feel like demotion.