Why Your Developers Don’t Test Enough

Especially when AI is writing more and more of your code

Let’s be honest: developers don’t test enough.

You see it every week — a feature is merged, staging breaks, and the bug was something obvious: a missing dependency, an incorrect flag, a minor logic error that could’ve been caught earlier.

With AI tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Windsurf writing code faster than ever, this problem is only growing.
The code output is higher — but the validation often isn’t.

This isn’t because developers are lazy. It’s because testing is hard, slow, and disconnected from their workflow.

The good news? You can fix this — without adding process, pressure, or bureaucracy.
You just need to make testing instant, isolated, and self-service — by using preview environments.

AI Is Shifting the Bottleneck from Code → Confidence

Today’s developers don’t spend most of their time writing code from scratch.
With tools like Copilot and Cursor:

Boilerplate is generated automatically
Functionality is scaffolded in seconds
Suggestions auto-fill logic, structure, and even test stubs

But here’s the problem: just because the code compiles doesn’t mean it works.

You now have more code, written faster, with less context — and very often, without full understanding of downstream effects.

That makes testing more important than ever.
And yet most developers still don’t test properly. Why?

Why Developers Avoid Testing (Even Good Ones)

Here are the real reasons, drawn from dozens of conversations with engineering teams at startups:

1. 🧱 Testing environments are hard to set up

Running the whole stack locally takes effort: services, databases, APIs, env vars. It's fragile and inconsistent.

2. 🚫 Staging is locked or unreliable

QA is testing something else. Data is stale. Feature flags aren’t aligned. It’s “not the right time to test.”

3. 🕒 Feedback takes too long

Even if CI passes, developers wait hours or days to get visual confirmation or functional QA. By then, context is gone.

4. 🧍 No ownership of testing

Developers rely on QA, QA relies on staging, staging relies on someone fixing it. No one owns fast feedback.

5. 🤖 “AI wrote it — it must be fine”

This is subtle, but real. AI-generated code looks polished. It reads cleanly. It creates false confidence.

Preview Environments Fix the Real Problem: Friction

A preview environment is a full-stack, production-like environment that spins up automatically for every pull request.

With it, developers get:

Instant feedback — click a link, test your change
Clean state — no waiting for staging, no collisions
Confidence — see it working before merge
Ownership — they can test their own code in seconds

And you, as a company, get:

Fewer bugs in production
Faster QA cycles
Better collaboration between devs, QA, and product

Real Example: Testing with and without Preview Environments

Without:

Dev opens a PR
CI passes
QA can’t test for 2 days because staging is blocked
The bug is caught post-merge
Hotfix is rushed on Friday night

With:

PR is opened
Bunnyshell spins up a live preview environment in 30 seconds
Dev tests it immediately
QA starts validating in parallel
PM gives feedback before it even hits staging

Result: No surprises. Higher confidence. Fewer rollbacks.

AI Will Keep Writing Code — Make Sure It Works

Your developers are writing more code than ever before.
But testing hasn’t caught up — and it’s creating cracks in your release process.

Preview environments remove friction and delay.
They make it easy — automatic, even — for developers to test what they build, in isolation, before anything is merged.

And in a world where AI generates a feature faster than a developer can explain it… that’s not just nice to have. It’s essential.

Try It in 30 Minutes

Bunnyshell spins up full preview environments for every pull request — with zero infrastructure headaches.

Start your 14-day free trial