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> With TDD I would be taxed heavily and velocity slow to a crawl.

And the code will be good.

not necessarily, TDD has little bearing on output quality

In what world or frame of reference would doing TDD have "little" bearing on output quality? If you build a system around satisfying some set of requirements it seems logical that output quality would have pretty heavy correlation.

It's possible to satisfy a set of requirements with code that's low quality. There's the maintainability of the code, for example, or the performance of the system.

The set of requirements TDD encourages code to meet happen to be ones that increase code quality.

Code that is easy to test tends to be well-structured.

Code that is badly structured tends to be hard to test.

TDD is not a QA methodology, it is a design methodology. It also tends to help quality out a lot, but that's a secondary effect.

for LLMs, TDD amounts to little more than ceremony. there is a study on this exact topic: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07900

That’s an interesting proposition, are you saying people do TDD just for the heck of it?

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