{"blyg":"0.4","id":"6p7pfh7s1c9yhjb0hcdm5m6tv6","kind":"thread","origin":"https://blyg.bricolage.io/","page":"t/6p7pfh7s1c9yhjb0hcdm5m6tv6/","author":{"name":"Kyle Mathews","url":"https://blyg.bricolage.io/"},"created":"2026-10-06T16:22:41Z","updated":"2026-10-06T18:32:05Z","version":2,"content_md":"![[7ymahdtnz8btg47m452x3td894]]\n\nThey suck unless you really need them — generally you really need them if the thing you're mocking is too expensive or slow to run or impossible to run e.g. a 3rd party API that doesn't have a test environment or a payment provider that would charge real money every run, anything that sends real emails or SMS to actual people, hardware you don't have on your dev machine (a printer, a GPU cluster, some IoT device), a huge ML model that takes minutes just to load, or nondeterministic stuff like the current time or randomness that you need to pin down to get a repeatable test.","content_html":"
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green tests prove the code agrees with its mocks

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As a non-software dev software person, i have never understood the purpose of mocks.

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They suck unless you really need them — generally you really need them if the thing you're mocking is too expensive or slow to run or impossible to run e.g. a 3rd party API that doesn't have a test environment or a payment provider that would charge real money every run, anything that sends real emails or SMS to actual people, hardware you don't have on your dev machine (a printer, a GPU cluster, some IoT device), a huge ML model that takes minutes just to load, or nondeterministic stuff like the current time or randomness that you need to pin down to get a repeatable test.

\n","content_hash":"sha256:cc70fa0c3d12d639e603b7ab87a832b632e03a9b95ef8b5071e9ca613d033590","media":[],"transclusions":[{"id":"7ymahdtnz8btg47m452x3td894","version":1,"origin":"https://blyg.aneeshsathe.com/","cited":{"source":"Aneesh's Blyg","author":"Aneesh Sathe","excerpt":"green tests prove the code agrees with its mocks As a non-software dev software…","url":"https://blyg.aneeshsathe.com/t/7ymahdtnz8btg47m452x3td894/","retrieved":"2026-10-06T18:32:05Z"}}],"stub_of":{"origin":"https://blyg.aneeshsathe.com/","id":"7ymahdtnz8btg47m452x3td894","version":1,"cited":{"source":"Aneesh's Blyg","author":"Aneesh Sathe","excerpt":"green tests prove the code agrees with its mocks As a non-software dev software…","url":"https://blyg.aneeshsathe.com/t/7ymahdtnz8btg47m452x3td894/","retrieved":"2026-10-06T18:32:05Z"}},"generated":[{"sources":[],"model":"claude-opus-5-5","at":"2026-10-06T18:31:51Z"}],"changelog":[{"version":1,"at":"2026-10-06T16:24:22Z","note":null},{"version":2,"at":"2026-10-06T18:32:05Z","note":null}]}