On the final day of HUSTEF 2026 in Budapest, I joined the conference’s roundtable on AI in testing — “AI Open Space Experiences: a roundtable with speakers on their experiences with AI testing.” It was five of us on stage: me plus Marta Firlej, Kristoffer Nordström, Callum Akehurst-Ryan, and Maryia Tuleika, with Marta moderating.

The format was refreshingly honest — “how we really use AI, with no bullshit.” Marta had run the same “AI open space” exercise with the Polish testing community, crowdsourcing the actual, un-hyped ways people use AI (information gathering, functionality discovery, generating tests and code, TDD, recruitment, presentation prep, even designing furniture and planning holidays), and then opened it up to the panel and the room. Here’s roughly how I answered her questions:

What do you use AI for? Mostly two things at work: analysing codebases and test code to understand what something actually does, and filling gaps on teams without a dedicated quality engineer — baking my testing knowledge into an AI the team can ask questions of. On the personal side, I’ve run some weird experiments: I’m a lifelong note-taker with decades of context (journals, therapy notes, eight years of WhatsApp history with my partner), so I’ve fed it all into a local, open-weight model and asked things like “what do I claim to believe, and where have I acted contrary to that — cite your evidence?” It’s a surprisingly honest mirror. I’m in a privileged spot with effectively unlimited AI access right now, and I know it won’t last, so I want to find out what’s safe and what isn’t while I can.

How do you stay up to date? Honestly, I don’t — not by chasing model releases or news. I keep up with how other people, especially in testing, are using AI, and I lean on my coworkers (we’re at the forefront of this at work, so stepping outside that bubble is a useful reality check). I do have a scheduled Claude Code task that scrapes my ~34 AI-related Slack channels into a daily digest of just the things I care about.

One piece of advice? Don’t trust AI too much, and don’t believe you’re as far behind as you think. Almost no one has really tried this stuff; it’s genuinely early, everyone’s learning, and your foundational testing skills transfer. Just pick it up, play, and if it’s not for you, move on.

Anything you’d never use AI for? Communicating with people as a proxy. I’ll use it to translate or to help me sound more fluent (I live across multiple languages — Portugal, Dutch, English), but I never want it to craft a whole message I didn’t think of. I don’t want to lose the discipline of actually talking to a human.

Ethical dilemmas? Yes — which is exactly why I keep my use mostly in the context of work, and try not to generate imagery or anything that’s obviously lifting from artists who deserve to be paid for it. There’s no hard line; it’s a sliding scale, and I have to keep questioning myself. (A Mastodon line stuck with me: the strange future where the humans do the menial tasks and the robots write poetry and paint. I try not to let AI stop me from making art.)

The best part of these panels is always the disagreement and the texture — five people who use AI daily and still land in very different places on trust, ethics, and what it’s actually for. Thanks to Marta for moderating and to Kristoffer, Callum, and Maryia for a genuinely good conversation.

Resources

• HUSTEF 2026
• My HUSTEF keynote: Asimov’s Zeroth Law of Robotics: Testing for AI