The Amnesia Cycle and Why AI Is Turning Developers Back Into Testers

I started working in technology around 1993. One of my first jobs was in quality assurance, partly because there was no security profession to join yet. There were people doing the work, but few companies were hiring for it. That changed within a decade. Until it did, people with the instincts that would later define security engineering landed in adjacent disciplines. Test was one of them. That was true for me. I became a test manager fairly quickly, later worked as a test architect, then went on to software development, security, and a bunch of other things. More than thirty years later, I find myself watching something funny happen. AI is turning software developers back into testers. Not the kind of testers we were in 1993. What it means to test software has changed several times since then. But at a more abstract level, the work is surprisingly familiar. The person is no longer primarily producing the thing. They are increasingly trying to determine whether the thing that was…