A seasoned tester shares a cautionary experience from a fixed-price consulting project where detailed test planning was ignored in the final project plan. Despite identifying a €25,000 bug early through proactive test planning, the tester's work was sidelined — partly due to AI-mediated communication replacing genuine collaboration. Key lessons include: AI is enabling people to skip building their own mental models, real-time collaboration beats artifact handoffs, and on hostile fixed-price projects it's sometimes more pragmatic to let the appearance of a plan coexist with the actual work being done.
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