alt Hacker NewsTDD sounds great on paper for agentic development but you quickly realize it balloons the token cost. Often I write some feature and then its repurposed or removed, code is refactored moved around as time goes. With TDD I would be taxed heavily and velocity slow to a crawl.
The waterfall approach is better after trying out TDD especially when you have a multi-agent setup. Also I found that in some cases the tests were just superficial hallucinations that never actually tested the components written or there some some context corruption and ultimately triggered a false positive that kicked off a completely unintentional refactoring.
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> With TDD I would be taxed heavily and velocity slow to a crawl.
And the code will be good.
But that repurposing/removal is exactly what's avoided if you follow through with the SEF framework he outlines.
I have to push back on the idea that token costs balloon when using TDD within the context of a strong framework such as Jason has laid out here.
If the feature is repurposed/removed/refactored....I'd argue the specification wasn't well thought out prior to burning into tokens.
We're so eager to do a lot of the wrong things quickly, when it may serve us better to do a more precise thing slowly.
Pattern-based testing can theoretically reduce the token cost?
My experience is the opposite. TDD keeps the guardrails on and let's me refactor with confidence.
Crazy times here in the development world. I'm always curious to watch other's best practices.