[dead]
Launch HN: Canary (YC W26) – AI QA that understands your code
21–30 of 32 posts
Re: Launch HN: Canary (YC W26) – AI QA that understands your code
#22The interesting question to me is not whether the system can generate a plausible PR-time test, but whether the useful ones survive after the PR is gone. If Canary catches a real regression, how often can that check be promoted into a stable long-lived regression test without turning into a flaky, environment-coupled browser script? That conversion rate feels closer to the real moat than the generation demo.
Good point. To keep the regression tests reliable as the app evolves, we run a reliability cascade. First, we generate and execute deterministic Playwright from the codebase. If execution fails then we fall back to DOM and aria tree. If that still fails, we fall back to vision agents that verify what the user actually sees before flagging a drift in the application behavior
Re: Launch HN: Canary (YC W26) – AI QA that understands your code
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! To execute these tests reliably you would need custom browser fleets, ephemeral environments, data seeding and device farms
If that's what you guys are bringing, you should put that more up front; focus on making it clear you're providing ingredients that Claude et al will not be providing on their own without Real Actual Software to do it.
Fair feedback. Will make that clearer. Appreciate it
Re: Launch HN: Canary (YC W26) – AI QA that understands your code
#24- there are atleast 10 dozen code review startups at this point and i see a new one on YC every week - what is your differentiator?
We see this as different from review. The system generates tests to catch second-order effects and executes them against the live application to expose bugs
Re: Launch HN: Canary (YC W26) – AI QA that understands your code
#25I really want automated QA to work better! It's a great thing to work on. Some feedback: - I definitely don't want three long new messages on every PR. Max 1, ideally none? Codex does a great job just using emoji. - The replay is cool. I don't make a website, so maybe I'm not the target market, but I'd like QA for our backend. - Honestly, I'd rather just run a massive QA run every day, and then have any failures bise…
Isn’t the last point the case with every AI startup? Nobody has a moat and it’s tough to build one because the playing field is so level.
I've been confused by this with many LLM products in general. Sometimes infrastructure is part of it so there's that, but often it seems like the product is a magic incantation of markdown files.
Re: Launch HN: Canary (YC W26) – AI QA that understands your code
#26I really want automated QA to work better! It's a great thing to work on. Some feedback: - I definitely don't want three long new messages on every PR. Max 1, ideally none? Codex does a great job just using emoji. - The replay is cool. I don't make a website, so maybe I'm not the target market, but I'd like QA for our backend. - Honestly, I'd rather just run a massive QA run every day, and then have any failures bise…
This benchmark measures whether tests are relevant, coherent, and have good coverage. But there's a more subtle type of error: AI creates tests that look specific to PR but are actually generic patterns mapped from the training data—correct test structure, reasonable assertions, but not actually interacting with what this specific piece of code does.
How do you differentiate between ""understood the code and generated a targeted test" and "recognized this looks like an auth flow and produced a standard auth test template"? The latter might still pass your coherence/relevance metrics while missing the actual exception.
Re: Launch HN: Canary (YC W26) – AI QA that understands your code
#27I really want automated QA to work better! It's a great thing to work on. Some feedback: - I definitely don't want three long new messages on every PR. Max 1, ideally none? Codex does a great job just using emoji. - The replay is cool. I don't make a website, so maybe I'm not the target market, but I'd like QA for our backend. - Honestly, I'd rather just run a massive QA run every day, and then have any failures bise…
Agree on your last point and it's going to be a very bitter lesson. In any case, you probably wanna shift alot of the code verification as left as possible so doing review at PR time isnt the right strat imo. And claude/codex are well positioned to do the local review.
Agree on the shift left concept, but curious on your thoughts about a checker-maker loop. Running a PR review bot is different from running /review on local dev right? And also there has been instance of Claude already patching the test scripts instead of fixing the bugs to make the tests pass.
Re: Launch HN: Canary (YC W26) – AI QA that understands your code
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t the last point the case with every AI startup? Nobody has a moat and it’s tough to build one because the playing field is so level.
I've been confused by this with many LLM products in general. Sometimes infrastructure is part of it so there's that, but often it seems like the product is a magic incantation of markdown files.
Solving for infrastructure is a huge part of the problem too. Curious to know what you think about it?
Re: Launch HN: Canary (YC W26) – AI QA that understands your code
#29I really want automated QA to work better! It's a great thing to work on. Some feedback: - I definitely don't want three long new messages on every PR. Max 1, ideally none? Codex does a great job just using emoji. - The replay is cool. I don't make a website, so maybe I'm not the target market, but I'd like QA for our backend. - Honestly, I'd rather just run a massive QA run every day, and then have any failures bise…
Agree on your last point and it's going to be a very bitter lesson. In any case, you probably wanna shift alot of the code verification as left as possible so doing review at PR time isnt the right strat imo. And claude/codex are well positioned to do the local review.
[deleted]
Re: Launch HN: Canary (YC W26) – AI QA that understands your code
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been confused by this with many LLM products in general. Sometimes infrastructure is part of it so there's that, but often it seems like the product is a magic incantation of markdown files.
Solving for infrastructure is a huge part of the problem too. Curious to know what you think about it?
Here I'm mostly considering the seemingly countless services that are little more than some markdown files and their own API passing data to/from the LLM procider's API.
By no means is that every AI product today, and I wasn't saying the OP QA service falls into that bucket though.
More of a general comment related to the GP, maybe too off topic here though?