From five days to two hours: what AI assisted test automation actually required
The pattern, the guardrails, and what adoption took inside a regulated engineering org.
Rafael Delgado / San Diego / Engineering Enablement
I build the golden path, then teach people to walk it.
Software architect at Best Buy Health. Twenty five years of turning early adopter curiosity into paved roads: CI/CD then, AI assisted engineering now.
Essays, one per quarter
Everything here comes from work actually done, never work invented for content. The first essay arrives this quarter.
Q3 2026 · In flight
Paved roads, published
Infrastructure
A documented home lab: UniFi network, Synology, Docker stacks, and reusable workstation build guides.
Automation
A GitHub Action delivering a daily Calvin and Hobbes strip to Discord since June 2025. Small, reliable, joyful.
Coming soon
Reusable AI guided GitHub workflow patterns
The public, pattern level version of workflows standardizing build, test, and deploy across dozens of repos.
The honest summary: a teacher who ships
I hand coded corporate sites in the 90s, drove microservices and CI/CD adoption in the 2010s, and now spend my days weaving AI into everyday engineering: playbooks, guardrails, and golden paths that let teams move fast in a regulated industry without relearning hard lessons.
Some of that work in numbers: an AI assisted test automation framework that cut QA setup from five days to under two hours, and a library of reusable AI guided GitHub workflows adopted across dozens of repositories by teams I mentored along the way.
Outside of work I command a Civil Air Patrol cadet squadron, which turns out to be the same job with a different uniform: build the paved road, then form the people who walk it. I live in San Diego with my wife Bethany and our six children.