alt Hacker NewsTests help to a point, but anybody who's worked on a large project knows that unit tests miss a lot of stuff because they don't focus on end-to-end relationships in code. There's a whole genre of memes about having unit tests and lack of integration tests for example. Of course you can add, integration tests, and regression tests, and so on. And you should, but doing that in the middle of you figuring how to best implement a particular feature is a lot of drag.
Often, when you're building something new, you're not sure what the best approach is. So, you need room to experiment and try different things to see what works best. Writing tests boxes you into an approach out of the gate.
Sure but do coding agents need this? They can create fixtures or scripts very quickly. No offence, but this article reads like a list of reasons you like Clojure.
I like many of the ideas in Clojure, but I never learned it, so it doesn't matter to me what advantages it provides to an agent if I can't understand the code its creating. This year I've done a lot of work modifying open source applications I use with agents, some in languages I don't know. One is Metabase, which is written in Clojure. Another is Forgejo, written in Go. I had no real experience with either language.
Go was much, much easier to understand in that context. I could review the agents changes and follow data flow, follow tests etc.
And no, its not because I'm more familiar with similar imperative languages. The last 14 years I've written the most code in Elixir and Haskell. Lots of Javascript, C++ and Python as well. Admittedly no Lisp other than a bit of emacs but semantically Elixir is probably closer to Clojure than most Lisps are.