been maintaining a decent-sized backend for a while and the api test suite was quietly becoming the worst part of the job. every schema change meant a wave of broken tests, plus a few that passed when they absolutely should not have. writing and updating cases by hand just wasn't keeping up.

spent the last couple months trying to fix the workflow rather than just grinding harder at it. two things that actually helped:

looked into a bunch of generative ai testing tools to stop hand-authoring every case. mixed bag honestly, but the ones that generate from real traffic instead of guessing from a spec were the useful ones.

and after years defaulting to Postman for everything, I finally tried a proper postman alternative for the automated side, which is where the manual upkeep was really piling up.

not going to pretend it's zero maintenance now, but it's a lot less. curious what everyone else is running for this, especially anyone on a big api surface who's solved the drift problem without a full-time person on it.