Find overlapping Rust tests with mutation testing
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To tackle the ever-increasing number of tests, I built cargo-test-prune.The idea behind it is to use cargo-mutants to generate mutants, and then solve the set cover problem for those mutants to suggest which tests can be eliminated. (use a greedy algorithm to cover the detected mutants with fewer tests)I came up with this as a countermeasure against the monotonically increasing tests that tend to accumulate, especially when coding with AI.In fact, this very repository was also written using AI.I ran this tool on a previous revision of this repository. There were 11 tests and 108 generated mutants: 73 were caught by the tests, 23 survived, and 12 failed to compile. I removed the 5 tests suggested by the tool and re-ran the same 108 mutants. The remaining 6 tests caught the exact same 73 mutants.Tests partly serve as documentation, so simply applying this isn't necessarily recommended, but since writing less code still holds value in the AI era, I think this tool could be quite useful.
HN · launched Oct 25, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 90%) · 0 views
Niche: automated software testing tools · 185 launches, 12 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
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More like this: all 185 launches in automated software testing tools →
Could you build this?
Yes The tool wraps the existing cargo-mutants utility and applies a greedy set-cover algorithm to pick a minimal test subset, which is a well-defined and modest algorithmic task.
Discussion
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Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 148 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #144 of 149 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 355 days after the earliest competitor.
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- RustAtlas · ph · 2026-11-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- mutator · github · 2026-09-30 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.41
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