TDD was ahead of its time

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Feb 21, 2026 • 1 min read


TDD was ahead of its time. Sure, it was boring, often felt cumbersome, and sometimes even borderline unnecessary when we forced ourselves to do it.

But now that coding agents are common and are taking over much of the implementation stage, test-driven development might make a comeback. This is what the SDLC could look like:

Write tests for the critical paths - both happy and unhappy - to the best of your ability :) Peers review them and leave comments. Then, leverage coding agents to add the missing ones.

And once everyone is comfortable with the suite, let coding agents take over the entire implementation until every test passes. So if LLMs handle the implementation, it is on us to make sure correctness is not compromised.

We are still accountable for what we ship.

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses