Yes. TFA author could have gone into it with this mindset and treated the initial work as a prototype with the idea of throwing it away and would have been happier about it.

> but tests make a whole lot more sense when you know what you're building.

It's very true. This is a "gotcha" a lot of anti-TDDers always bring up, and yet some talk about "prototyping == good" without ever making the connection that you can do both.

Two different extremes of dumbassery. If you can't program without the simplest dogma guiding you then programming isn't for you. If you don't even know what you're building why are you selling it as a product?! What are you doing in those 18 months that you don't understand anything about the thing you are building.

It should be common sense to add common sense tests to critical components. Now they are doing TDD THEY STILL DON'T KNOW THE CRITICAL COMPONENTS. Nothing changed. They lack systems thinking.

My guess is that both are just vibecoded slop.

in an age of generated tests, a mandate on no tests is just dumb