Stop Clicking Through Your UI: Test Your API Directly using AI (and Wire It Into CI/CD)

Most of us waste insane amounts of time clicking through UIs to test backend code. You know the drill—you tell Claude or GPT to scaffold a new API feature, it cranks out the route and handler in seconds, and then... you spend the next 10 minutes manually testing it through your frontend. It's madness.

I've built enough API-driven apps with Next.js and Nuxt to know this pattern kills productivity. You get your AI to write "Create an API route that takes a title and some chapters and generates a PDF"—boom, done in 30 seconds. Then you boot the whole app, navigate to some form, fill it out, click submit, and pray. You just threw away all the speed you gained.

Here's the thing: the AI that just wrote your code knows exactly how that code works. It knows the endpoint, the payload structure, everything. So why are you manually clicking through forms like it's 2005?