Where Are the Test Driven Agentic Workflows, Anyway?
By my very uncharitable math, agentic software engineering methodologies have gotten to somewhere around the 1970s. Like everything in AI, this is, of course, a speed run. We’re very quickly relearning why software engineering management and software engineering project management matter.
So by next Tuesday, maybe folks will start thinking about what they can steal from XP.
I’ve been thinking that we’re probably not that far away from seeing a decent boost in quality from coding agents that implement a Test Driven Development workflow.
Based on my experience, it’s not really possible to get a coding agent to follow
TDD on its own by instructing it to. Even with the rules of TDD spelled out in an
AGENTS.md or similar, I’ve found that they will write tests
simultaneously with the production code. They don’t bother ensuring they see a
test fail for the expected reason. I don’t know if that is because the models
themselves have trouble following the instructions, or if the agent’s system
prompts are interfering.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if next Tuesday Claude Code does ship a TDD mode that explicitly takes the LLM through the TDD process.