tdd

A test-first development method built around writing a failing test, making it pass, and then improving the code. TDD means test-driven development.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when building features or fixing bugs, especially when writing integration tests that describe real behaviour.
Why use it?
It keeps tests focused on what users can do through public interfaces, so internal refactoring is less likely to break them.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ayoubben18/ab-method/tdd
Any agent
npx skills add ayoubben18/ab-method --skill tdd
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ayoubben18/ab-method

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 45 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,228 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00045 $0.01228
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00614
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00246
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00123

Measured 3d ago against content hash 9e3370f33068, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

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 3d 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.

.agents/skills/tdd/SKILL.md · 125 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 125 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.

Seams — where tests go

A seam is the public boundary you test at: the interface where you observe behavior without reaching inside. Tests live at seams, never against internals.

Test only at pre-agreed seams. Before writing any test, write down the seams under test and confirm them with the user. No test is written at an unconfirmed seam. You can't test everything — agreeing the seams up front is how testing effort lands on the critical paths and complex logic instead of every edge case.

Ask: "What's the public interface, and which seams should we test?"

Seam placement is a design decision, not a testing one. When the answer is "there isn't a good seam here," that's a design problem — run the codebase-design skill for the vocabulary and the deep-module principles before contorting a test around the current shape.

Anti-Pattern: Tautological Tests

The assertion recomputes the expected value the way the code does — expect(add(a, b)).toBe(a + b), a snapshot derived by hand the same way, a constant asserted equal to itself. The test passes by construction and can never disagree with the code.

Read the full file on GitHub · 125 lines

Files

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.

Changes

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.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 125 lines · 45 tokens per session scan A 9e3370f33068

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tdd is a skill published in the GitHub repository ayoubben18/ab-method (187 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 1,228 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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