Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to a9a4k/tour. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/a9a4k/tour/main/.agents/skills/tdd/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/a9a4k/tourWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/a9a4k/tour/tdd)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/a9a4k/tour/tdd"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/a9a4k/tour/tdd/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/a9a4k/tour/tdd"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/a9a4k/tour/tdd.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00045 | $0.00973 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00018 | $0.00389 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00195 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00097 |
Grade A, and why
tdd scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
This is a copy
83% identical to tdd — 9 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 112 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Test-Driven Development
Philosophy
Core principle: Tests should verify behavior through public interfaces, not implementation details. Code can change entirely; tests shouldn't.
Good tests are integration-style: they exercise real code paths through public APIs. They describe what the system does, not how it does it. A good test reads like a specification - "user can checkout with valid cart" tells you exactly what capability exists. These tests survive refactors because they don't care about internal structure.
Bad tests are coupled to implementation. They mock internal collaborators, test private methods, or verify through external means (like querying a database directly instead of using the interface). The warning sign: your test breaks when you refactor, but behavior hasn't changed. If you rename an internal function and tests fail, those tests were testing implementation, not behavior.
See tests.md for examples and mocking.md for mocking guidelines.
Anti-Pattern: Horizontal Slices
DO NOT write all tests first, then all implementation. This is "horizontal slicing" - treating RED as "write all tests" and GREEN as "write all code."
This produces crap tests:
- Tests written in bulk test imagined behavior, not actual behavior
- You end up testing the shape of things (data structures, function signatures) rather than user-facing behavior
- Tests become insensitive to real changes - they pass when behavior breaks, fail when behavior is fine
- You outrun your headlights, committing to test structure before understanding the implementation
Correct approach: Vertical slices via tracer bullets. One test → one implementation → repeat. Each test responds to what you learned from the previous cycle. Because you just wrote the code, you know exactly what behavior matters and how to verify it.
WRONG (horizontal):
RED: test1, test2, test3, test4, test5
GREEN: impl1, impl2, impl3, impl4, impl5
RIGHT (vertical):
RED→GREEN: test1→impl1
RED→GREEN: test2→impl2
RED→GREEN: test3→impl3
...
What ships with it
5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 1mo ago First seen · 112 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A 807b4eadaa49
tdd is a skill published in the GitHub repository a9a4k/tour (5 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 973 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 83% identical to tdd, differing in 9 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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