We went 100% automation on a client project. Here's what broke.

Last year we had a client come to us after they'd fired their entire manual QA team. They'd invested six months into a Cypress suite with 400+ tests, hired two automation engineers, and felt confident they had testing covered. Three weeks after the manual testers left, their support tickets tripled. The automated suite was passing. Every single run: green. And their users were reporting bugs that no script had ever thought to check for. I've seen this play out at BetterQA more times than I can count. A team gets excited about automation, treats it as a silver bullet, and then learns the hard way that a green CI pipeline is not the same thing as a working product. This is the story of what actually happens when you go all-in on automation and abandon manual testing entirely. The green suite problem Here's the thing nobody tells you about a 100% automated test suite: it only checks for things you already thought of. Every automated test starts as a human decision. Someone sat down, consi