i don't think this is as much as an AI issue as it is about path of least resistance in a velocity-driven environment.

call me the worst junior dev in the industry, but pre-coding agents, closing tickets was more important than upholding absolute quality. not everybody is dealing with a billion concurrent users with multi-geo deployments. most of the time, a few screenshots or test output for manual validation is enough to go ahead. when pressed with time and without the prerequisites in the infra side, doing the absolute best development and testing is a luxury only for daydreamers.

automated testing can be a double-edged sword. pre-LLM, even test coverage was a number that somehow needed to go up after each PR. this only resulted in shady tactics of pointless test cases that slowly bring up the metric. today it can be very dangerous if both code and its test suite are vibe coded. especially when it can give the appearance of that 90%+ code coverage.

on the other hand, some manual testing to make sure the core functionality works is the bare minimum one does before pushing out code. at least i would like to believe it is.