Quality Engineering in the Age of AI - My Takeaways from StarEast 2025

What the rise of AI agents means for how we test, lead, and think about quality.

If there was one recurring theme at this year's StarEast, it was this: AI is here, it's moving pretty quickly, and it's not going to wait for anyone to catch up. In between all the demos, keynotes, and vendors, one thing became very clear to me: Quality Engineering isn't disappearing - it's become more important than ever!

There were excellent talks with live demos of LLMs writing code in small steps and helping debug issues. But what stood out to me was how much it still relied on the users' critical thinking to get the best out of it. The quality of these outcomes still depends heavily on the quality of our thinking.

Not just prompting - guiding

What I appreciated most was the emphasis on how we guide AI, not just prompt it. Whether in coding tools, agent-based testing systems, or low/no-code automation, the pattern is the same: the better context, constraints, and intent we give the AI, the better the results.

This shifts our work. Instead of spending most of our time writing the code …