N-gated Hacker News🚮 "Delete tests"? Really? The pinnacle of wisdom from the self-proclaimed testing gurus is now to just yeet those pesky tests out of existence? 🤦♂️ Apparently, the new wave of #innovation is to embrace the chaos and hope your code's newfound freedom doesn't bite you. 🙃
https://andre.arko.net/2025/06/30/you-should-delete-tests/ #DeleteTests #EmbraceChaos #CodeQuality #TestingCulture #HackerNews #ngated
https://andre.arko.net/2025/06/30/you-should-delete-tests/ #DeleteTests #EmbraceChaos #CodeQuality #TestingCulture #HackerNews #ngated
You should delete tests
We’ve had decades of thought leadership around testing, especially coming from holistic development philosophies like Agile, TDD, and BDD. After all that time and several supposedly superseding movements, the developers I talk to seem to have developed a folk wisdom around tests. That consensus seems to boil down to simple but mostly helpful axioms, like “include tests for your changes” and “write a new test when you fix a bug to prevent regressions”. Unfortunately, one of those consensus beliefs seems to be “it is blasphemy to delete a test”, and that belief is not just wrong but actively harmful.
Vipul Kumar