What it was for
QA-as-a-phase existed because human-written software arrived in large, irregular batches that had to be inspected before release — a checkpoint staffed by the only people in the building professionally incentivised to distrust the work.
The verdict
DISSOLVES — the phase, emphatically not the instinct. A gate sized for weekly batches cannot stand in front of a loop producing verified increments hourly; it becomes either a bottleneck or a rubber stamp, and both fail. But the QA mindset — adversarial curiosity about how systems break, professional distrust of the happy path — is precisely the sensibility the engine's verification layer is starving for.
What changes
The career transforms even as the department dissolves. Exploratory testers become evaluation engineers: their accumulated intuition about where software lies gets encoded into executable checks the inner loop runs every revolution. The job moves from finding the defect to teaching the system what a defect is. Exploratory testing itself survives in a smaller, sharper form — aimed at exactly the behaviours evaluations cannot yet express.
The strongest objection
Some quality is irreducibly human-judged: feel, accessibility in practice, the thing that is technically correct and obviously wrong. Fully conceded — that judgment is outer-loop work and endures. What dissolves is the conveyor belt, not the connoisseur.
Sharpened: manual regression QA — re-running scripted checks a machine can run — is what dissolves. Exploratory and adversarial QA, the lived-use judgment that catches accessibility, localisation, visual regression, and trust-eroding feel, does not dissolve; it transforms into verification design.
Falsification: this is wrong if a class of defects only manual attention catches has no executable expression — in which case the phase transforms rather than dissolves.