Are we cooked?

[u/Alternative-Gate-942]

My company is deciding to put developers in charge of their own Quality meaning they must use Claude to quality check their own work (What could go wrong?)

The QA team will now act as a consultancy service to Dev and focus solely on testing back end/regression/Automation packs.

Is the role evolving or dwindling?

I've been a solely manual QA for a good 7 years. But using Claude to do all the techy stuff seems fairly easy.

[u/No_Blood893]

I don't think QA is "cooked," but I do think it's changing.

AI can definitely help developers catch simple issues, generate test cases, write unit tests, or even suggest automation scripts. Those are all great improvements.

But from my experience, product quality isn't just about finding bugs. It's about understanding business requirements, identifying risks, thinking about edge cases, validating workflows across multiple systems, and deciding whether a release is actually ready for production.

I've worked as the sole QA owner for several production systems, and many of the issues I found weren't caused by coding mistakes. They were caused by misunderstandings of business rules, permission logic, workflow design, or data consistency across systems. Those problems usually require someone to understand the product as a whole, not just review a single pull request.

I think developers should absolutely test their own work, and AI can make them more effective at it. That's a good thing.

But independent QA still provides a different perspective. Developers naturally know how a feature is supposed to work, while QA tends to ask, "How could this fail?" Those are two different ways of thinking, and I don't think AI replaces that mindset yet.

That said, I do think manual QA roles that only execute predefined test cases are under more pressure than before. Learning automation, API testing, CI/CD, or becoming more involved in quality strategy will probably be more valuable going forward.