The Coverage Loop: Turning Free AI Tokens into Verified C++ Tests
Unit tests are boring. Coverage is not optional. I asked a free AI model to write my tests. It failed. Then I built a feedback loop. Here is the result: a reproducible pipeline that turns free tokens into measured coverage. Why Generated Tests Miss Everything Models guess. They do not know your intent. A test that compiles is not a test that asserts. A test that asserts is not a test that covers.…
The article describes a method to generate C++ tests using a free AI model and then measure the coverage of those tests through a feedback loop. The process is designed to reach a target of 90% line coverage for a small C++ string utility.
The steps in the loop include sending the header to the AI model to generate tests, compiling and running the tests, measuring coverage with gcov, extracting the coverage percentage, and feeding the missing lines back to the model for further test generation. This cycle is repeated until the coverage no longer improves.
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