Interesting point about mocks being seen as a bad word. I've been in situations where relying solely on integration tests led to some really frustrating moments. It's like every time we thought we had everything covered, some edge case would pop up out of nowhere due to an API behaving differently than we expected. I remember one time we spent hours debugging a production incident, only to realize a mock that hadn’t been updated was the culprit—definitely felt like we'd fallen into that "mock drift" trap.

I've also started to appreciate the idea of contract tests more and more, especially as our system scales. It kind of feels like setting a solid foundation before building on top. I haven’t used Pact or anything similar yet, but it’s been on my mind.

I wonder if there’s a way to combine the benefits of mocks and contracts more seamlessly, maybe some hybrid approach where you can get the speed of mocks but with the assurance of contracts... What do you think?

I feel like https://pact.io is more appropriate link, no?