[HN Gopher] April Fools 2014: The *Real* Test Driven Development...
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April Fools 2014: The *Real* Test Driven Development (2014)
Author : omot
Score : 110 points
Date : 2025-08-13 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (testing.googleblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (testing.googleblog.com)
| Kuraj wrote:
| If I didn't read past the concept and the date I would've
| accepted it as real without a blink of an eye
| hinkley wrote:
| It probably could though. Or at least to the extent that
| declarative languages ever really work for real world problems.
|
| But iif you perfected it then it would also be the thing that
| actually kills software development. Because if I told you your
| whole job is now writing tests, you'd find another job.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Isn't this project management, kinda? writing requirements
| and acceptance criteria and broad designs to hand off to a
| dev
| hinkley wrote:
| Not any manager I've ever worked with. Including the good
| ones (but especially not the bad ones).
|
| Their job is to make sure that the business people and the
| devs sort it out without coming to blows. When they do work
| like this it's generally as a template to be copied, not
| the entire project.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Not that long ago that was a literal job for some software
| engineers. Whole departments of them.
| hinkley wrote:
| I love a quality QA engineer.
|
| But the only people who write code as bad as QA folks do
| are the DevOps people.
|
| The paradox of SDETs is: QA makes less than dev, no matter
| what flavor. If you're good at poking holes in developer
| logic, and you can code yourself, there's a 40-60% raise
| for you if you can switch into security consulting, which
| takes the same foundational skills and some reading.
|
| So there are at least two brain drains for "good coder in
| test", and we aren't even the most lucrative one.
| GranPC wrote:
| > We will offer a free (rate-limited) service that everyone can
| use, once we have sorted out the legal issues regarding the
| possibility of mixing code snippets originating from open-source
| projects with different licenses (e.g., GPL-licensed tests will
| simply refuse to pass BSD-licensed code snippets).
|
| Well, looks like they sorted em out!
| siva7 wrote:
| > We are pleased to announce the Real TDD, our latest
| innovation in the Program Synthesis field, where you write only
| the tests and have the computer write the code for you!
|
| Boy would they only know 10 years later you don't even need to
| write tests anymore. Must feel like Sci-fi timeline if you
| warped one of these blog authors into our future
| bathtub365 wrote:
| Now we can simply sit back and assume the computer is doing a
| good job while we fold laundry
| protonbob wrote:
| Man. I wish the computer did the laundry and let me do the
| coding. What happened here?
| laxd wrote:
| It's called washing machines. They come with a computer
| built-in.
| ericghildyal wrote:
| Mine still makes me figure out what's in the machine and
| fold it after, am I due for an upgrade?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| We aren't really far off from that, perhaps.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| We're beyond that, now we can vibecode both the tests and the
| implementation.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I've been thinking about this a lot and we don't really do
| tests right. But if we did, ya, maybe we could just vibe code
| an entire system (the AI would have to run tests and fix
| things if it didn't work out).
| benreesman wrote:
| It's always been possible to vibe code, it's just really fast
| now!
|
| I've done slipshod work full of bugs and security problems
| and thrown it over the fence hoping it will stand up long
| enough to be someone else's problems like 20 years ago!
| jessekv wrote:
| > We once saw a comment in the generated code that said "I need
| some coffee".
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| To put things into perspective: DeepMind was founded in 2010,
| bought by goog in 2014, the year of this "prank". 11 years later
| and ... here we are.
|
| Also, a look at how our expectations / goalposts are moving. In
| 2010, one of the first "presentations" given at Deepmind by
| Hassabis, had a few slides on AGI (from the movie/documentary
| "The Thinking Game"):
|
| Quote from Shane Legg: "Our mission was to build an AGI - an
| artificial general intelligence, and so that means that we need a
| system which is general - it doesn't learn to do one specific
| thing. That's really key part of human intelligence, learn to do
| many many things".
|
| Quote from Hassabis: "So, what is our mission? We summarise it as
| <Build the world's first general learning machine>. So we always
| stress the word general and learning here the key things."
|
| And the key slide (that I think cements the difference between
| what AGI stood for then, vs. now):
|
| AI - one task vs. AGI - many tasks
|
| at human level intelligence.
|
| ----
|
| I'm pretty sure that if we go by _that_ definition, we 're
| already there. I wish I'd have a magic time traveling machine, to
| see Legg and Hassabis in front of gemini2.5/o3/whatever top model
| today, trained on "next token prediction" and performing on so
| many different levels - gold at IMO, gold at IoI, playing chess,
| writing code, debugging code, "solving" NLP, etc. I'm curious if
| they'd think the same.
|
| But having a slow ramp up, seeing small models get bigger,
| getting to play with gpt2, then gpt3, then chatgpt, I think it
| has changed our expectations and our views on what is truly AGI.
| And there's a bit of that famous quote "AI is everything that
| hasn't been done before"...
| bitwize wrote:
| Back in the 90s, Pixar put out a joke SIGGRAPH paper about
| rendering food with lots of food-related puns and so forth. In
| 2007 they released _Ratatouille_ , which required them to
| actually develop new rendering techniques, especially around
| subsurface scattering, to make food look realistic and
| delicious.
| outside1234 wrote:
| They knew the future in 2014 and somehow wasted 10 years
| jasoneckert wrote:
| The best part of April Fools jokes are that they capture the
| spirit of the time.
|
| I remember the Thinkgeek PC EZ-Bake Oven that fit into a 5.25"
| bay in your PC - fitting for 2004!
| https://hoaxes.org/af_database/permalink/pc_ez-bake_oven
|
| And my favourite: Microsoft's Alpine Legend for Xbox 360 in 2009
| that caused a stir because so many people actually wanted that
| game to be real. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUBQknWUEYU
| noiv wrote:
| Well, in 1957, BBC Panorama aired a 3min segment how Swiss
| farmers harvest spaghetti from trees.
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