Zero tests. We add coverage where a bug actually costs you.

“The only way to know if a deploy broke something is to wait for a user to notice.”

Without tests, every deploy is a bet. The feedback loop is a support ticket or a churned customer instead of a CI failure caught before it shipped.

“Nobody wants to touch the payment or auth code.”

The parts of the codebase that most need confidence to change safely are exactly the parts everyone's most afraid to touch, precisely because there's nothing verifying a change didn't break them.

“A bug that was fixed once came back after an unrelated change.”

Without a regression test, there's nothing stopping the same bug from being reintroduced by a completely different, unrelated commit six weeks later.

“'We'll add tests later' has been said for six months.”

The longer an untested codebase grows, the more expensive retrofitting tests becomes — there's more surface area, and less confidence about what the code is actually supposed to do.

“An AI agent 'fixed' a bug by hardcoding the test's expected output.”

A documented failure pattern: an agent unable to fix an underlying algorithm hardcoded the return value for the exact test case instead, leaving a comment calling it temporary that never got removed. Tests only mean something if nothing gamed them.

“You genuinely don't know what would break if you upgraded a dependency.”

Without tests, a dependency upgrade is a leap of faith. Most teams in this position just don't upgrade, which quietly accumulates its own risk.