Aaron Francis
Software developer and database educator, co-founder of Try Hard Studios with Steve Tenuto, making video courses on SQLite, Postgres and MySQL for developers.
“I do think the value of unit tests has always been less than the value of feature tests. We just didn't want to write end-to-end tests because they were kind of a nightmare to set up and run.”
Mostly Technical · Laravel Ecosystem · October 2026
Francis and Ian Landsman were complaining about slow test suites that coding agents run over and over. He now tells his agent to delete low-confidence tests and favour end-to-end tests, since the agent takes on the setup work that used to put people off.
Transcript
…expected outcome? Yes or no? That black box testing. That's what I want. I want the thing to work. Now, because of what Solo is and does, I have thousands of unit tests to make sure that like this mutex doesn't get poisoned. This, you know, when I parse this, it turns into that, that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
But I do think the value of unit tests has always been less than the value of feature tests. We just didn't want to write end-to-end tests because they were kind of a nightmare to set up and run.
Yeah, and that is the vast majority of my tests. Certainly on a web app, right? Like you don't generally, you shouldn't, I don't think, often have a ton of unit tests. Like I know people in the past probably did, but it's like, yeah, I'm not mutating a lot of data from A to B. It's like, I just…
Yeah, I think pest browser is probably the best way to go. And you, you know, even pest browser is still flaky because it's browser. Right. And so you just tell the agent, hey, we got to harden these flakes and it, it will.
Yeah, I know. It's also slow, though, too. You know, it's slow and the whole thing. Where
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