Comment by xorcist
3 days ago
How does that work? Does one agent write the tests from spec, and then another agent is told "make tests pass", or do you write the tests manually?
It does sound like a possible way to parallelize agentic work, but I'd be surprised if the results are better than a non-TDD approach where the agent would write both tests and code from spec.
I would expect the agent to suffer the same problems humans do with TDD, namely that it is hard or impossible to properly model data ("understand the problem") from tests alone. And if we are to believe Frederick Brooks, as I think we should, a good data model is imperative to good code. That is why TDD failed in the real world, and that problem is excarbated with agentic coding.
It is time we as an engineering discipline sober up about which methodologies work in the real world after decades of empirical data. Name the ten most successful software projects right in front of you now, and I bet that exactly none of them were designed from tests. One would expect at least one, from decades of best selling books on the subject.
In fact, it is high time to put the OOP paradigm under scrutiny and see which promises were delivered on and which weren't. Apart from a few functional languages, mainstream language design got stale for a long time until we finally got Rust and Go which broke with the strict paradigm.
> How does that work?
It works well. For those who sell tokens.
As much as the (agentic) processes are more and more complex it guarantees that more tokens will be sold tomorrow. Sell tokens FTW!