One thing I did recently with the bot definitely involved actual smoke tests, though: I was working with real hardware that can blow up in real ways, with the bot doing all of the circuit design work and coding based on my goals while I just distantly commanded the show from On-High and plugged shit into a breadboard.

(The project works well and I consider it to be Good Enough; I might go back and polish it more later. There was no smoke, but there could have been.)