One thing I did recently with the bot definitely involved actual smoke tests, though: I was working with real hardware that can blow up in real ways, with the bot doing all of the circuit design work and coding based on my goals while I just distantly commanded the show from On-High and plugged shit into a breadboard.
(The project works well and I consider it to be Good Enough; I might go back and polish it more later. There was no smoke, but there could have been.)
Another example of typical botspeak is "smoke test". Why not just say "test"? It feels like a way of downplaying the ability to detect problems.