Test Debt in the Age of AI: From Backlog to Strategic Asset

As we move into the second quarter of 2026, the conversation about AI in engineering should have moved well past autocomplete. Frontier systems now work in iterative modify-run-analyze loops and stay coherent over multi-hour tasks. They are posting benchmark results that would have sounded implausible a year ago, including Humanity's Last Exam scores in the mid-40s. Public evaluations of agentic performance are also stretching into the multi-hour range, with some reported planning-horizon estima