tdd

tdd is a skill for Claude Code from vinnie357/claude-skills. It costs 43 tokens per session (3,280 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to Test-Driven Development (TDD), a way of writing a failing test first, making it pass, and then improving the code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Planning tests, developing features test-first, applying the Red-Green-Refactor cycle, and designing software incrementally.
Why use it?
It gives a repeatable sequence for building software in small steps while continuously checking that existing behavior still works.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the core plugin — 14 skills, 5 commands, 7 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Planning tests, developing features test-first, applying the Red-Green-Refactor cycle, and designing software incrementally.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/tdd
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.

Any agent
npx skills add vinnie357/claude-skills --skill tdd
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vinnie357/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 14 skills, 5 commands, 7 agents, 1 hook.

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/vinnie357/claude-skills/tdd/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/tdd)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/tdd"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for tdd

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/tdd"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/tdd.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,280 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00043 $0.03280
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.01640
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00656
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00328

Measured 10d ago against content hash e6656a8a8ebe, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, 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 10d 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.

plugins/core/skills/tdd/SKILL.md · 334 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 334 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Test-Driven Development

A discipline for growing software guided by tests, one small step at a time.

The TDD Cycle

Five Steps

  1. Write a test list — brainstorm the tests you think you'll need
  2. Write one failing test — pick the next test from the list
  3. Make it pass — write the simplest code that makes the test green
  4. Refactor — remove duplication and improve design, keeping tests green
  5. Repeat — pick the next test, update the list as you learn

Red-Green-Refactor

The micro-cycle is a three-state machine:

    ┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
    │                                      │
    ▼                                      │
  [RED] ──── write minimal code ────► [GREEN] ──── refactor ────► [GREEN]
    ▲                                                                │
    │                                                                │
    └──────────── write next failing test ◄──────────────────────────┘

RED: Write a test that fails. Confirm it fails for the right reason — the missing behavior, not a syntax error or wrong import.

GREEN: Make the test pass with the simplest change possible. "Sinful" code is fine — hardcoded values, copy-paste, whatever gets green fastest.

REFACTOR: Clean up while all tests stay green. Remove duplication between test and production code. Improve names. Extract methods. This is where design emerges.

Rules:

  • Never write production code without a failing test
  • Never write more test code than needed to fail
  • Never write more production code than needed to pass

The Three Laws

Uncle Bob's formalization of Beck's constraints:

  1. You shall not write production code unless you have a failing test
  2. You shall not write more of a test than is sufficient to fail (including compile failures)
  3. You shall not write more production code than is sufficient to pass the currently failing test

These laws enforce the micro-cycle. They keep steps small and feedback immediate.

Read the full file on GitHub · 334 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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. 10d ago First seen · 334 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A e6656a8a8ebe

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tdd is a skill published in the GitHub repository vinnie357/claude-skills (25 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 3,280 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.