In my experience, agents often think of more edge cases than humans when writing unit tests. But under the guidance of certain skills, they can become mechanical and lose sight of the business logic.
For example, when I use the Superpowers skill set, the agent proactively adopts TDD for every new feature. But its understanding of testing often stays superficial: if the user asks for a screen with a “Send” button, it first writes a test checking whether the button exists. The test fails, so it adds the button to make it pass.
As a result, the test suite fills up with low-value cases that check whether a property exists or a string matches exactly. The agent follows the “write a failing test, then implement the feature” workflow, but never really tests the business behavior: When should sending be allowed? What should happen after success or failure? How should duplicate submissions be handled?
The problem isn’t that agents can’t write tests. It’s that they seem prone to reducing TDD to a rigid sequence of steps, struggling to independently derive meaningful test cases from business requirements and use them to drive development.
Probably because thats how most companies do it because most corporate workers are lazy box-tickers who are long fed up with the processes. It really feels like we're forcing human processes onto AI.
What actually is the point of TDD? - If its to force you to think about edge cases early before you've started building the feature then that sounds like a human trait - If its to be living documentation then that sounds like a human trait
We're going into weird rabbit holes where we've mismatched the tool that is AI which produces extremely cheap code very quickly - with the processes that we've built for slow and expensive to write human-generated code.