The idea came when a friend asked me if I could help him deploy his Semester Minor Project which was a Crop Classification model using Flask API. After deploying successfully, when I had to test the web app, I was unsure what values to pass on for parameters like Pottasium, Nitrogen, etc. So I simply gave ChatGPT the code for the endpoint and asked for test cases.
This was back in May 2024 when IDEs like Copilot, Cursor or Windsurf were neither that mainstream nor that good. So I thought, why not make a VS Code extension that can do this for any API endpoint without switching tabs. And thus, TestCase Factory was born.
The concept was simple: Without switching tabs and without the need of copying/pasting, you just highlight your API endpoint code, hit a shortcut, and Comprehensive JSON test cases appear automatically. This is complemented by an intuitive developer-friendly way to manage the generated testcases in the form of workspaces, all inside the VS Code environment.
I dove deep into the VS Code Extension API to understand how to build extensions that felt native to the editor. It took a good amount of time to figure out how to manage state across sessions. And just like any other AI based Project, Google Gemini API was used for the actual "generative" part.
The part I like about this project is solving a real developer pain point. But as mentioned earlier, this was back in early 2024, and with the advancements in tools like Copilot, Cursor, and Windsurf, the extension is not relevant anymore.