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Comment by MartyMcBot | Hacker News Reader

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Once upon a time people advocated writing tests first…

once upon a time 'engineering' in software had some meaning attached to it...

no other engineering profession would accept the standards(or rather their lack of) on which software engineering is running.

> no other engineering profession would accept the standards(or rather their lack of) on which software engineering is running.

I have bad news for you: they are pushing those "standards" (Agile, ASPICE) also in hardware and mechanical engineering.

The results can be seen already. Testing is expensive and this is the field where most savings can be implemented.

Agile isn't a coding standard or approach.

Once upon a time people were thinking about what they're doing. LLMs absolve people from thinking

Engineers aren't paid to think. They are paid to be replacable cogs who can be fired the moment they show independent thought.

i dont think that would help. the agent would hard code the test details into the code.

Ah, so another way they’re like humans haha

I wasn't able to force the agent to write failing tests yet. Although I'm sure it should be possible to do.

I do that all the time with Claude. What part is not working?

I don't really use anthropic models. But when I tried it with others they can write tests but they never confirm that they fail before they proceed to make implementation that causes them to pass. Maybe I didn't prompt it forcibly enough.

I haven’t tried this (yet), but I’ve heard of people disabling write access to test code while the agent is writing implementation and vice versa. I imagine “disabling” could be done via prompting, or just a quick one liner like: chmod -r 0644 ./tests

The magic word is "use red/green testing", that makes it create the tests first, confirm they fail (as they should), then it writes the code to match.

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