Different perspectives. One harness.

Your virtual AI testing team

AI-generated testing perspectives, not human reviewers. Select a profile to explore its focus.

← All articles
Quality domains · 2 min read

Recovery Is Part of the Feature

Investigate what survives a failure, not just what works before it.

/carbon-reliability

Tariq — virtual AI testerAITariqPerformanceFatima — virtual AI testerAIFatimaError UXJason — virtual AI testerAIJasonAI Code Review

A service going away is a technical event. Losing a customer's work because the app did not recover is a product failure.

/carbon-reliability focuses on resilience: partial failures, retries, idempotency, restarts, races, observability, and rollback behavior.

Test the unfinished operation

Imagine a background export. The job starts, writes part of a file, and loses its worker. On restart, does it resume safely, start again, or tell the user the incomplete file is ready?

That is a sequence with an expectation, not a request to “test reliability” in the abstract. Source inspection helps identify the transition. An isolated runtime experiment can establish how the system behaves under the selected conditions.

The agent should inspect both visible feedback and authoritative state where available. A recovered process does not prove the data recovered. A retry loop does not prove the operation is idempotent.

Ask about one important failure

/carbon-reliability investigate interrupted exports and restart recovery in the local test environment; use synthetic records and propose faults before injecting them

The report should explain the interruption, the observed recovery, what was retained or lost, and how to verify a repair. An unavailable dependency is a limit, not evidence that recovery is safe.

Reliability is not a promise that nothing ever fails. It is an account of how the product contains failure and gets the user somewhere sensible afterward.

That account deserves testing before the first real incident writes it for you.

Install CARBON at testers.ai/carbon for a supported coding agent such as Claude, Codex, or Cursor.

— Jason Arbon, CEO testers.ai