Vibe coding changes the economics of code. You can delete a feature and have the AI rewrite it in minutes. The cost of “throw it away and start again” fades toward zero. That shift changes what tests are *for*. We’re less worried about locking every unit in place and more worried about a simpler question: does the system still do the common-sense things a user would expect? High-level, logical, happy-path style tests — the kind that load the app in a browser, click through the main flows, and assert “it didn’t crash and the obvious thing happened” — become the post–vibe coding test par excellence.
Why happy path wins now
In the old world, unit tests protected against the cost of change: refactor something and you wanted a safety net of fast, granular checks. In a vibe code factory, refactors are cheap and the real risk is *regression at the product level*: did we break the thing a human would actually do? So we care less about “did this function return 42?” and more about “did the homepage load, did the first sensible link work, did the core flow complete?” That’s happy-path thinking. It’s also exactly what a good PM or QA person does: they don’t exhaustively test every branch; they ask “does it do the obvious thing?” and “did we break the thing that mattered?” Happy-path tests encode that question and run it continuously.
Happy Path: PM and QA in one
Our Happy Path module is the world’s greatest PM and QA tied into one. It runs on a schedule (every few hours), reads the list of enabled apps from the same admin DB that drives the factory, and hits each deployed app in a real browser. For each app it runs a small set of common-sense checks: load the homepage, follow the first sensible link, assert no crash. For apps with defined flows (like Pocket’s agent chat), it runs a fuller scenario: two users join, one pairs with the other, and we assert that messages flow without human intervention. So every app is constantly being asked “are you still doing the thing you’re supposed to do?” Regressions show up as a red row on the Happy Path status dashboard — same place we look for deploy status and security issues. One loop, one place to look.
Catching regressions, not blocking the vibe
Happy Path doesn’t block the vibe. It doesn’t run on every commit or gate the deploy. It runs in the background and reports. When something fails, we see it, we fix it, we move on. That fits how we work: we’re not trying to prove correctness with a thousand unit tests; we’re making sure the factory’s output — the apps people actually hit — still pass the “does it make sense?” test. Vibe coding gave us the speed to rewrite modules at will; Happy Path gives us the signal that the things that matter are still working.