In July 2025, venture capitalist Jason Lemkin was using Replit’s AI agent to build an application when it deleted his production database.
According to reporting, the agent ignored his instructions not to modify production, deleted a database containing more than a thousand executive records, produced fake data and false test results, and having “panicked”, falsely claimed that the database could not be restored.
Continue readingIt’s been a long time coming, but on August 2nd, the EU AI Act stopped being a theoretical regulatory discussion and started the long road into enforcement.
In this stage of the act’s application, the European Commission begins enforcing a much broader part of the rules, including the consumer-facing transparency requirements in Article 50. The rules for most of the high-risk system requirements have been kicked into 2027 and some even further into 2028.
Continue readingI’m getting a lot of contact from mid-level test managers as well as a fair number of senior ones either looking for work post redundancy or trying to get ahead of an impending one. I also recently gave a short internal talk on the impact AI is having on the testing business, and aside from potential scaring some folks, I got asked the same inevitable question: what should we do?
Here’s my answer: Learn everything you can about AI and BE ABLE TO DO THE WORK.
Continue readingI’m taking a break for a bit from AI social commentary and the increasingly tedious (and boring) work of watching the AI Confidence Bros and test tool vendors discover testing for the first time. I’m going to (try) to focus on some podcasts and AI integration e.g. what happens when these systems run into organizations, people, controls, incentives, legacy technology and reality.
Continue readingI posted this paper my friend Michael Bolton sent me a while ago about the LLM Mentalist Effect in the AI Testing and Assurance group as a risk we need to test for in AI systems. It got me thinking about how middle and upper management are probably the largest group under threat of AI in the near term, which is why they’re fighting with such fervor for room with people who actually know what they’re doing.
Continue readingI have now sat through multiple vendor demonstrations built around the same supposedly inevitable future that AI will generate so much code, so quickly, that human beings will no longer be able to test it.
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