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"... treating the whole job as a black box"

Yes, that is exactly what I mean. You ask the Wizard of Oz for something, and you hear some sounds behind the curtain, and you get something back. Validate that, and if necessary, ask Oz to try again.

"The obvious answer to this is that it is not feasible to retry each past validation for each new change"

It is reasonably feasible because the job of Production Development and QA has existed, developers just sat in the middle. Now we remove the developer, and move them over to the role of combined Product + QA, and all Product + QA was ever able to even validate was developer output (which, as far as they were ever concerned, was an actual black box since they don't know how to program).

The developer disappears when they are made to disappear or decide to disappear. If the developer begins articulating ideas in language like a product developer, and then validates like a QA engineer, then the developer has "decided" to disappear. Other developers will be told to disappear.

The existential threat to the developer is not when the company mandate comes down that you are to be a "Prompt Engineer" now, it is when the mandate comes down that you need to be a Product Designer now (as in, you mandated not to write a single. line. of. code.) . In which case vast swaths of developers will not cut it on a pure talent level.





You haven’t addressed the original question. The point is not whether the QA understands the codebase, but whether the QA understands its own test system.

If yes, the QA is manuallish (considering manual == no automate by AI) and we’re still bottlenecked, so speeding up the engineer was a loss for nothing.

If no, because QA is also AI, then you have a product with no humans eyes on it being tested by another system with no human eyes of it. So effectively nobody knows what it does.

If you think LLMs are anywhere near that level of trust I don’t know what you’re smoking. They’re still doing things like “fixing” tests by removing relevant non passing cases every day.




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