How agentic QA cuts the test maintenance tax

Every QA budget has a line item for building test coverage, but 30–50% of that automation budget ends up spent on maintenance instead of new tests. That disparity stays invisible until a release goes out, the application shifts underneath the tests, and the QA team spends the next three days rewriting broken scripts instead of finding new bugs. This leaves testers facing a wall of failures and brittle scripts that quickly compound into a test maintenance tax: a tax on their