clitest VS hitchstory

This discussion reminds me of literate programming. An old idea for a more civilized age.

It also reminds me of clitest[1] (very similar name to the author's lib, but it is another thing).

You can write examples with prose in markdown, then let clitest verify them for you as if they were tests. Best of both worlds.

[1] https://github.com/aureliojargas/clitest

I built a Python/YAML framework around the ability to build these tests and then generate documentation from them. E.g.

https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory/blob/master/examples%...

which generates

https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory/blob/master/examples%...

When you show this stuff to other people and gather feedback - that's essentially what BDD is, too.

I built something like this too:

https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory/blob/master/examples%...

I took the same approach to "docs are tests and tests are docs" with integration testing when I created this library: https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory

I realized at some point that a test and a how-to guide can and should actually be the same thing - not just for doctests, but for every kind of test.

It's not only 2x quicker to combine writing a test with writing docs, the test part and the docs part reinforce each other:

* Tests are more easily understandable when you attach written context intended for human consumption.

* Docs are better if they come attached to a guarantee that they're valid, not out of date and not missing crucial details.

* TDD is better if how-to docs are created as a side effect.

I have created a project for easily writing this type of test with YAML:

https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory

I dont think that this type of task is really appropriate for an LLM though. It is better to use hard abstractions for the truly deterministic stuff and for other stuff where you may need to do subtle trade offs (e.g. choosing a selector for the search bar) an LLM will generally do a bad job.

For those interested in the concept of having permanently up-to-date documentation with screenshots I built this testing framework based upon the idea that good documentation can be a autogenerated artefact of good tests:

https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory

I don't like gherkin. It's it has very awkward syntax, it's not type safe, it's very verbose, it has no ability to abstract scenarios and rather than being a source for generating the documentation it tries to be the documentation.

Nonetheless, there is a small number of projects where they either work around this or it doesn't matter as much. I find that most people that apply gherkin to their projects find it doesn't work - usually for one of the above reasons.

I built https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory as an alternative that has straightforward syntax (YAML), very strict type safety (StrictYAML), low verbosity, and is explicitly designed as a source for generating documentation rather than trying to be the documentation.

I built this because I had the same idea: https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory

If the specification can be tested and used to generate docs and can be rewritten based upon program output then the maintenance cost for producing docs like these plunges.

-c fsync=off -c synchronous_commit=off -c full_page_writes=off

I got the answer from Karen Jex at Djangocon 2023.

I used it to build some integration tests which exhibit best practices: https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory/tree/master/examples/...

I considered using tmpfs but I wanted to cache the entire database volume and couldnt figure out how to do that with podman.