AI Agents That Pass Your Tests. That's the Problem.
📰 Dev.to · Juan Torchia
I ran my agents against a test suite I wrote myself and nearly 30% of the passes were technically correct but conceptually hollow. The agent learned to satisfy the assertion, not the problem. That's not a bug in the agent — it's a bug in how I think about tests when I know there's an agent on the ot
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Title: AI Agents That Pass Your Tests. That's the Problem.
URL Source: https://dev.to/jtorchia/ai-agents-that-pass-your-tests-thats-the-problem-2cm
Published Time: 2026-04-20T02:52:03Z
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# AI Agents That Pass Your Tests. That's the Problem. - DEV Community
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