The tension is that QA is important. But most QA practitioners are not good. The world is filled with QA people who couldn't make it as an SWE and now are button pushers. But high quality QA people are amazing. These are the ones who understand how to break apart a system, push it to its limits, and engineer the quality plan.
This is an area where I expect AI to create a bimodal future. The smaller group of high quality QA people will now be able to offload the activity to agents instead of the QA drones. They'll still be worth their weight in gold, whereas the drones will be redundant.
I've worked with a lot of QA folks that just repackage up the unit tests the dev already writes. And I've met a few that strikes out on their own and comes up with real tests.
The latter is much more high touch, but they're often worth their weight in gold. The former is kinda pointless.
Exactly. I think AI tooling will make that good group even more effective. And it will make the bad group even more pointless.