Most teams treat test coverage as a proxy for reliability. The logic feels airtight: more tests mean more things are being verified, which means fewer things can go wrong. So they scale the suite. More scripts, more flows, more cases. And for a while, it works. Then it stops working - not suddenly, but gradually. Tests start failing for reasons no one can immediately explain. Some get re-run until they pass. Some get quarantined. Some just get ignored. The suite still runs. The numbers still look respectable. But nobody actually trusts the results anymore. That is not a tooling problem. It is a strategy problem that tooling is being blamed for. Automation does not fail at scale because teams do it wrong. It fails because the conditions under which it succeeded no longer exist. The early phase of automation looks reliable because the system is simple. Fewer dependencies, more predictable behavior, stable assumptions. When those assumptions hold, even poorly designed tests produce useful signal.…