tdd

tdd is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from helderberto/agent-skills. It costs 33 tokens per session (1,279 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A test-first development method. TDD means writing a test for expected behavior, making the code pass it, and then improving the code while keeping the test passing.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when building features or fixing bugs through small test-and-code cycles, especially when adding integration tests.
Why use it?
It helps catch broken behavior early and keeps tests focused on what users can do instead of on internal code details.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the hb plugin — 40 skills, 6 agents shipped together

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install hb, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 40 skills, 6 agents.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for tdd

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/helderberto/agent-skills/tdd.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/helderberto/agent-skills/tdd)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/helderberto/agent-skills/tdd"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/helderberto/agent-skills/tdd.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,279 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 $0.00033 $0.01279
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00639
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00256
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00128

Measured 4d ago against content hash ddc32d9354e5, 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 4d 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.

skills/tdd/SKILL.md · 132 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 132 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
  ...

Read the full file on GitHub · 132 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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. 4d ago First seen · 132 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A ddc32d9354e5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tdd is a skill published in the GitHub repository helderberto/agent-skills (14 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 1,279 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.