> I would never want to be tasked with e2e browser automation again
This is how I felt before I started using Cypress. You need a tool that helps you rather than being a drag on you, and you need to commit some time to it. It's helped me learn a lot of coding I didn't otherwise know. Writing the test itself is usually not "real coding" but writing helper methods and learning how to organize your code certainly is. The trick to making it all work is making your tests not flaky. They need to pass 99% of the time. Now we have a few hundred long end-to-end tests and maybe 2 of them are flaky at any given time. They are easy to fix when they break, and they uncover important bugs on a regular basis.
Granted, I'm in the business of testing. Anything that isn't automated I have to do manually. And I have to represent a real user, so simple API tests are not going to cut it, and I have an incentive to automate the entire end-to-end process with multiple variations. But if you want to do short API tests you can certainly do that, and Cypress is actually a nice tool for that too.
This is how I felt before I started using Cypress. You need a tool that helps you rather than being a drag on you, and you need to commit some time to it. It's helped me learn a lot of coding I didn't otherwise know. Writing the test itself is usually not "real coding" but writing helper methods and learning how to organize your code certainly is. The trick to making it all work is making your tests not flaky. They need to pass 99% of the time. Now we have a few hundred long end-to-end tests and maybe 2 of them are flaky at any given time. They are easy to fix when they break, and they uncover important bugs on a regular basis.
Granted, I'm in the business of testing. Anything that isn't automated I have to do manually. And I have to represent a real user, so simple API tests are not going to cut it, and I have an incentive to automate the entire end-to-end process with multiple variations. But if you want to do short API tests you can certainly do that, and Cypress is actually a nice tool for that too.