You know where this is heading, right?

We’re being told that AI systems are too complex, too sophisticated, and too difficult to test and that it’s easier to try to conjure up a confidence index than it is to properly test them. Respected people in the software testing world are saying things like “you need to let it go and just like, trust the AI” and describing AI native test tools as a “magic trick”.

These are not serious people.

They would have you believe that uncertainty, context, risk, system behavior, and human judgment should be repackaged from the foundations of good quality management to a reason to lower the bar. Not openly, of course. Nobody says, “We’ve discovered testing and decided it’s too hard, so we are going to replace it with a vibes chart.” That would sound ridiculous. So instead, we get another BS test management theory.

The broader business world is already preparing for the quality capitulation to our AI “friends”. Cal Newport’s piece sets out that AI is not breaking work because it was already broken. We were already drowning in shallow busy work with middle management consistently mistaking movement for action. Modern testing practices turned this into a high art.

This article in Fortune lays out the idea that AI will not transform your business unless you redesign the work itself. Fair enough, but you can see the next step in this in this Register story about why Amazon isn’t in love with “human in the loop” because of how messy we are. I guess when we finally give up the desire for “baseline human comfort” like drinking water, we can quicken the birth of our super-intelligence overlord to tells us how confident we should be in the future.

As all these converging factors start to come into focus, the software testing industrial complex response does their usual complete and utter abdication of their role as the conscience in technology to just make sure everyone likes them.

Instead of saying, “We need better accountability, better evidence, better models of risk, and better use of human expertise,” the AI Confidence Bros take their 30 pieces of silver for trying to quietly downgrade everyone’s ambitions.

The great irony of it all is that the exact same people who created, sold, and grifted the buyers of testing services through vanity metrics for the last 20 years, are now the exact same people trying to wash their hands of it all. The lack of self-awareness in creating another manifesto full of shallow binary choices in the style of the one that got us into this mess in the first place is breathtaking.

Shilling confidence is the final form of the enshittification of software testing. First, tools help testers. Then tools reshape testing around what vendors can automate. Finally, testing itself degrades into whatever the platform can measure, summarize, and sell back as “confidence.” The product gets worse, the language gets better, and everyone gets to pretend test has transformed.

But hey, want to feel confident? Just lean back and let it do it’s thing…I mean, it’s got electrolytes!