This matches my experience more than most automation writing. The line that lands hardest is "did the product break, or did the test break" - on a backend serving seven teams, as the only QA, that investigation was eating more of my week than writing the tests ever did.
The flaky-as-trust-risk framing is right. Once people start re-running a red build by reflex, the suite has already lost. What helped me was refusing to label anything "flaky" as a category and instead forcing a class on every failure: timing, selector drift, data state, environment, or a real regression. A bucket you cannot name is usually one you have stopped reading.
On AI as a junior QA that still needs review, agreed, and the review cost is real and recurring. A generated test that nobody on the team can debug six weeks later is not coverage, it is debt with a green checkmark.
Question on your maintenance model: when a test survives a UI change without edits, how do you confirm it still asserts the original intent and did not quietly degrade into a weaker check that just happens to pass?
This matches my experience more than most automation writing. The line that lands hardest is "did the product break, or did the test break" - on a backend serving seven teams, as the only QA, that investigation was eating more of my week than writing the tests ever did.
The flaky-as-trust-risk framing is right. Once people start re-running a red build by reflex, the suite has already lost. What helped me was refusing to label anything "flaky" as a category and instead forcing a class on every failure: timing, selector drift, data state, environment, or a real regression. A bucket you cannot name is usually one you have stopped reading.
On AI as a junior QA that still needs review, agreed, and the review cost is real and recurring. A generated test that nobody on the team can debug six weeks later is not coverage, it is debt with a green checkmark.
Question on your maintenance model: when a test survives a UI change without edits, how do you confirm it still asserts the original intent and did not quietly degrade into a weaker check that just happens to pass?