Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Retail stores have long relied on a secret weapon to measure and improve the shopping experience: the secret shopper. Posing as ordinary customers, they evaluate the customer experience, spotting friction points like hard-to-find items, gauging the quality of customer service, and testing how seamless the checkout process feels.

This could’ve been prevented. This should have been prevented. This too. We all hate getting tagged in PRs. The time, the blame for when you inevitably miss something, and constant “I wouldn’t have written it that way” feeling is just hard to shake. LLMs promised this would get easier. Promised they would do it for us. But as we’ve seen, we’re not there yet. But this is what Sentry does for a living. We catch bugs… in prod.

Dan Mindru is a Frontend Developer and Designer who is also the co-host of the Morning Maker Show. Dan is currently developing a number of applications including PageUI, Clobbr, and CronTool. I find it remarkable that we’re getting so many AI startups every day. As software engineers, most of us like to know what our software is actually doing. We plan, review, and perform automatic tests to verify it’s working as expected. Then we do a round of manual testing for good measure. Not with AI.

When a page pauses for even a quarter-second users feel it, and many will tab away before the spinner stops. Front-end performance testing lets us spot those delays on our own machines instead of reading about them in support tickets. The browser runs JavaScript, layout, painting, and every user interaction on a single main thread. If one task takes too long, everything else queues up behind it.

At Sentry, we build in public and we move fast. But moving fast means we don’t always get everything right on the first try. That’s where feedback comes in: it helps us validate what’s working, spot what’s missing, and catch issues we wouldn’t always see through error tracking alone.