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> This is why I start every single one of my projects with a passing test. It doesn’t matter what this test is—assert 1 + 1 == 2 is fine!
These two statements do not add up.
That said, I think he just means "do the work to get tests in place, and build the habit of running them as part of your development cycle", even if, when starting, what you're running isn't helpful. The idea being that building "write a test" "run the tests" into your iterative loop, from the beginning, is a worthwhile practice.
That's before considering even if the tests do test something, most code tests written are easily improved upon garbage.
My point here is about ensuring you have a test suite from the very first commit to a repo, so you have an obvious place to add tests to in further commits.