Re:What if your QA engineer never slept?
by jakedlu on Monday May 12, 2025 @10:00AM
(#43962995)
I think it's an interesting idea, especially if it's just running on production or staging and constantly just trying new flows/testing edge cases. I would be curious about (1) the quality of testing compared to an actual human and (2) the cost involved. Obviously compared to a human salary the cost could get quite high before it became an impediment (also depending on quality). But running an agent 24/7 seems like costs could certainly pile up.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Really good points. On quality it’s not replacing human insight, but it is exceptional at pattern recognition and coverage at scale. It catches edge cases that tend to get missed and never forgets past regressions. The best results I’ve seen come from pairing the agent with human QA. The agent does ambient monitoring and flags suspicious behavior. Humans then dig deeper.
Cost-wise, it’s surprisingly reasonable. The version I saw ran in containers that spun up based on commit activity or deploy frequency. So if no one is pushing code, it's idle. But during launches or busy dev cycles, it ramps up. Much cheaper than staffing a full team to maintain 24/7 vigilance.
With Actory AI https://actory-website.vercel.app/ we found the sweet spot was letting the agent watch for regressions and PR risk patterns, while human testers focused on creative edge cases and UX paths. QA gets more strategic, less repetitive—morale actually went up once they weren’t stuck rerunning the same flows.
We are pre launch any feedback is welcome.