6.10When to Use the Critic-Actor Pattern

Best for:

• When test quality matters more than speed
• Critical paths (authentication, payments, data integrity)
• Regulated environments (healthcare, finance) where test quality is auditable
• Teams new to AI test generation (the Critic catches AI failure modes)

Trade-off: 2-3x more expensive than single-agent generation (multiple LLM calls per round). But the quality improvement often saves more time in human review than it costs in tokens.