Oh, I will never give up on TDD. And the assistants are great at helping to write tests, and especially analyzing the tests you have and suggesting others for edge cases.

But I have repeatedly seen claude get hung up on TDD itself and I've tried lots of different prompts/directions. It runs into a problem and inevitably runs ever more complicated shell commands and creating weird temp input files than sticking to "cargo test" and addressing the failing test.

Since I need to review the agent's code, I'd much prefer it to use a workflow like a human, with a progression of small commits following TDD--much easier to review the code then. If it's just splatting up big diffs, then it makes review harder, and that offsets any productivity gains.