> I trust them to add tests almost indiscriminately because tests are usually cheap; if they are wrong it’s easy to remove or modify them
Having worked on legacy codebases this is extremely wrong and harmful. Tests are the source of truth more so than your code - and incorrect tests are even more harmful than incorrect code.
Having worked on legacy codebases, some of the hardest problems are determining “why is this broken test here that appears to test a behavior we don’t support”. Do we have a bug? Or do we have a bad test? On the other end, when there are tests for scenarios we don’t actually care about it’s impossible to determine if that test is meaningful or was added because “it’s testing the code as written”.
Having worked on legacy codebases this is extremely wrong and harmful. Tests are the source of truth more so than your code - and incorrect tests are even more harmful than incorrect code.
Having worked on legacy codebases, some of the hardest problems are determining “why is this broken test here that appears to test a behavior we don’t support”. Do we have a bug? Or do we have a bad test? On the other end, when there are tests for scenarios we don’t actually care about it’s impossible to determine if that test is meaningful or was added because “it’s testing the code as written”.