Checksum, the continuous quality platform for engineering teams, has launched its API Agent, a new continuous testing agent designed to automatically generate and maintain journey-based tests for backend APIs. The solution aims to address a growing gap in modern software development, where AI-assisted coding accelerates feature delivery faster than engineers can build and maintain reliable test coverage.
As engineering teams adopt AI coding tools to accelerate backend development, API endpoints are being created and modified at a pace that often outstrips traditional testing workflows. This leads to unstable test suites and gaps in coverage, particularly for complex multi-step API interactions.
Checksum’s API Agent is designed to close this gap by continuously generating and maintaining tests that evolve alongside the API itself, ensuring that quality assurance keeps pace with development speed.
Traditional spec-based test generators typically validate individual endpoints by checking schemas or response structures. However, many production failures occur not at the endpoint level but across sequences of API calls where state, identity, and data dependencies matter.
Checksum’s API Agent instead generates stateful, multi-step “journey-based” tests. These workflows simulate real product behavior by capturing dynamic values such as IDs and tokens at runtime, passing them between steps, and validating both successful flows and error conditions.
The output is generated in standard PyTest format, allowing engineers to review, understand, and maintain tests within their existing workflows.
One of the key challenges in API testing is maintenance overhead, where test suites break frequently as APIs evolve. Checksum’s approach is to shift this burden from engineers to its testing agent.
The API Agent identifies when endpoints or schemas change, maps those changes to affected test journeys, and proposes updates through reviewable sessions. This allows teams to approve modifications rather than manually tracking and fixing broken tests across large codebases.
“Every team knows it should have API tests. The reason it doesn't is that the tests rot faster than they catch anything, so the suite becomes one more thing to maintain instead of something the team trusts,” said Gal Vered, Founder and CEO of Checksum. “We built the agent to carry that maintenance, so coverage grows with the API instead of decaying against it.”
Checksum reports that teams using its platform see up to 82% lower test failure rates compared to manually maintained test suites. The API Agent can generate full API journeys—such as creating a resource, capturing its ID, updating it, and validating the result—without requiring engineers to manually wire dependencies between steps.
The system can operate from API specifications or captured traffic, without requiring direct repository integration, enabling teams to establish meaningful test coverage in a matter of days rather than weeks.
For organizations already using Checksum’s end-to-end testing agents, API and UI-level testing can now be unified within a single platform.
The API Agent is available immediately through Checksum’s platform at checksum.ai.
Checksum is an AI-powered continuous testing platform that helps engineering teams keep quality in step with the pace of AI-driven development. Its agents generate, run, and maintain end-to-end and API test suites automatically, surfacing real issues for review instead of leaving teams to write and repair tests by hand. Checksum is headquartered in San Francisco. Learn more at checksum.ai.
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