February 26, 2026
Testpocalypse or just a prank?
Move tests to closed source repo
Fans cry foul, others say it’s a joke, and AI says “hold my beer”
TLDR: tldraw suggested moving hundreds of quality checks from public view to a private repo, sparking a firestorm over transparency and “open source” optics. Commenters split between betrayal-of-the-commons, “it’s just a joke,” headline nitpicks, and hot AI takes—plus a few threatening to switch to rival tools.
tldraw’s team floated moving hundreds of project “tests” — the checklists that make sure things don’t break — from its public GitHub repo to a private one, and the comments section lit up like a Friday night deploy. One camp called it a hit to the commons: as one user put it, “public tests are a valuable public good.” Another warned they’ll jump ship to rivals like Excalidraw or Xournal++, arguing the earlier shutdown of community contributions over “slop” (low‑quality AI spam) already felt performative.
Then came the hot takes. A skeptic laughed that AI could just generate an even better test suite, so hiding them won’t stop copycats. Others nitpicked the headline itself, saying the repo wasn’t even open source in the strict sense — calling out the semantics as Hacker News sport. And just when the pitchforks were sharpened, a commenter dropped a twist: the thread was partly a joke, which only fueled more chaos.
So is this a trust fracture or a tempest in a teacup? Either way, the vibe is spicy: fans worry about transparency, pragmatists shrug at private QA, and trolls are here for the popcorn while AI gets dragged into yet another culture war.
Key Points
- •Plan to move ~327 unit, integration, and e2e tests from the public tldraw/tldraw monorepo to a closed-source repository.
- •Scope includes migrating all Vitest and Playwright tests, configurations, setup files, and shared test utilities.
- •Private CI will be set up to run the full test suite against SDK packages; tests will then be removed from the public repo.
- •Current tests span multiple packages with Vitest (node/jsdom) and Playwright e2e suites for examples and dotcom.
- •The article details CI workflows and key dependencies, plus a Vitest config inheritance chain and per-package polyfills/mocks.