Why I'm building a free, open-source AWS emulator

A few days ago, our CI started failing. The culprit: localstack:latest now requires an account and an auth token. Broken builds. I'd seen LocalStack creeping toward proprietary for a while, but this was the moment it actually hit. A colleague noticed it at the same time as me, but I was already working on a fix. I patched the build, but the question stuck: how long can we keep using the old version until we start having real problems? I don't trust mocks I should back up. I care about tests a lot. Enough to become a maintainer of Chai.js. Enough that when I build something, the test infrastructure comes first. But I have a specific opinion about what kind of tests matter. I hate mocks. Not the concept — the way most codebases use them. You end up with tests that don't test anything real. You're asserting that you call functions in the right order. You're verifying the plumbing, not the behavior. The worst part is when mocked tests give you false confidence. I've seen tests that assert