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.