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Every distributor we spoke to has the same quiet bottleneck, and none of them call it a problem. They call it Tuesday. A request for quote lands in a shared inbox. Sometimes it is a tidy bulleted list. More often it is three lines of text from someone's phone, or a PDF that was scanned at an angle. Someone on the sales desk reads it, works out which catalog part each line actually refers to, checks pricing, and types up a quote. A busy desk does this thirty or forty times a day. It is slow, it is boring, and it is exactly the kind of work where a tired person on a Friday afternoon quotes the wrong bolt and nobody notices until the shipment arrives. We spent three weeks building Distill.ai to do that job. This is what we learned, including the parts that went badly. What we actually built You paste an email or upload a PDF. From there a seven stage pipeline runs: parse -> extract -> classify -> match -> price -> policy -> score Parse cleans the document into text. Extract pulls out the individual line items, quantities, and specs. Classify works out what kind of request this is. Match maps each line to a real catalog SKU. Price applies the pricing rules. Policy runs the business checks. Score attaches a confidence value to every match. The interesting part is not the happy path. It is what happens when the model is unsure. Any line that scores below a 0.70 match threshold does not get quoted. It gets flagged with a reason and routed to a human review queue. A person confirms or corrects it, and the quote goes out clean. That one decision is the difference between a demo and something a sales desk would actually put its name on. An agent that is confidently wrong 5% of the time is worse than useless in procurement, because someone has to check all 100% of the output anyway. An agent that says "I got 47 of these 50 lines, here are the 3 I could not resolve" saves real hours. Why Qwen, and how we wired it up We used two models from Alibaba Cloud Model Studio: Qwen-Plus

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You have been here. The test suite is green. The deployment pipeline reports all checks passed. Then a customer opens a ticket with a screenshot that shows something your test never caught. The test passed in staging. It fails in production. And you cannot reproduce it locally. This is not a flaky test problem. It is a fidelity problem. Your test environment and your production environment are not the same thing. The gap between them is where real bugs live. Let me walk through one concrete example, the fix, and what it teaches about writing tests that survive the handoff to a real user. The Problem: Environment Drift A fintech team I worked with had a checkout flow. The test clicked "Pay Now", waited for a success message, and asserted the text "Payment successful" appeared on screen. It passed every time in staging. Customers reported that after paying, they saw a blank white page for several seconds before the success message appeared. Some of them closed the tab during that blank period, thinking the payment failed. The transaction went through. The customer never saw the confirmation. Support tickets piled up. The test never caught this because the staging environment served the success page in under 200 milliseconds. The blank period did not exist there. Production had a slower downstream service that introduced a three-second delay between the payment confirmation and the page render. The test was correct in what it checked. It was wrong in what it assumed about timing and state. The Fix: Test the Experience, Not Just the Outcome The fix was not to add a longer wait. The fix was to test what the user actually experiences during that gap. Here is a minimal Playwright test in TypeScript that catches this class of problem: import { test , expect } from ' @playwright/test ' ; test ( ' checkout shows loading state before success ' , async ({ page }) => { await page . goto ( ' /checkout ' ); await page . fill ( ' #card-number ' , ' 4111111111111111 ' ); await page

Gherkin is not a test automation tool. It never was. Yet here we are, five years into your SDET career, and you're staring at a feature file that reads like a step-by-step manual for a human tester. Given I log in with username "admin" and password "password123" . When I click the "Submit" button . Then I see the text "Welcome" on the screen . You've written two years of these. Your team calls it BDD. Your manager calls it "living documentation." And somewhere in the back of your mind, a quiet voice whispers: This is just a manual test case with extra steps. That voice is right. Let me say it plainly: if your Gherkin scenarios describe how the system works instead of what it should do, you are not doing BDD. You are writing manual test cases in a structured English format and calling it automation. The only thing you've automated is the illusion of progress. The problem isn't Gherkin. The problem is how we use it. Most teams adopt BDD because someone read a blog post about "collaboration" and "shared understanding." They install Cucumber or SpecFlow. They write feature files. They map steps to Selenium or Playwright code. And they call it a day. But look closely at what happens next. The product owner never reads the feature files. The developer skims them once and goes back to writing code. The QA engineer — that's you — becomes the sole maintainer of a growing pile of Gherkin that nobody else touches. You're not facilitating collaboration. You're translating manual test cases into a format that requires a compiler. Here's the real test. Take any feature file from your project. Hand it to a developer who has never seen it. Ask them to implement the feature using only the Gherkin as a spec. If they can write production code from it, you have real BDD. If they ask you for clarification, you have documentation theater. I've seen teams with hundreds of feature files. Beautifully formatted. Perfect indentation. Tags for every regression cycle. And not a single one of th

Most engineers expect AI-assisted automation to be the easy part. You describe a test, the model writes it, you move on. The first week will prove you wrong. Not because the code is bad. Because the code is almost right. And almost-right code is harder to debug than wrong code. Wrong code fails loudly. Almost-right code passes on Monday, fails on Tuesday, passes again on Wednesday, and by Thursday you are questioning whether you understand your own application. I have watched teams adopt AI copilots into their Playwright suites and spend the first five days doing nothing but untangling false passes. If you are about to start this journey, here is what that week actually looks like. The Problem: The Model Does Not Know What "Stable" Means A language model has never waited for a network response. It has never watched a flaky selector survive three CI runs and then collapse on the fourth. It writes tests from a static understanding of your page, not from the dynamic reality of your application. You will ask it to write a test that clicks a button and waits for a confirmation toast. The model will produce something like this: await page . click ( ' button:has-text("Submit") ' ); await page . waitForSelector ( ' .toast-success ' ); Looks fine. Runs fine. Then your team deploys a new build where the toast takes 400ms longer to appear because of an analytics call. The test fails. Not because the feature broke. Because the model assumed a timing that was never guaranteed. This is the core problem. The model writes tests that match the page as it was when the model saw it . It does not write tests that match the page as it will be . The Solution: Treat AI-Generated Tests as Drafts, Not Deliverables The shift is mental before it is technical. You cannot review AI-generated tests the way you review human-written tests. Human tests come with intent. AI tests come with patterns. You need a different review lens. First, look for every hardcoded wait. Replace it with a state-based

Do you need to be in your car to set up your digital car key?

A judge has paused the Paramount / Warner Bros. deal to review a multi-state lawsuit.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Over the weekend, several current and former advisors to President Donald Trump on AI publicly lobbed insults at the country’s leading AI companies. David Sacks, the president’s AI and crypto “czar” until…

The lawsuit from the states alleges that the deal would harm movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and audiences.