[godelski]

  > you're not trying to prove correctness in a mathematically sound way.

  > "locking" the behavior to whatever it currently is.

These two sentences are incompatible

  > The #1 reason TDD failed is

Because spec is an ever evolving thing that cannot be determined a priori. And because it highly incentivized engineers to metric hack.

  > It's a bunch of repetition with slight variations

If that's how you're writing tests then you're writing them wrong. You have the wrong level of abstraction. Abstraction is not a dirty word. It solves these problems. Maybe juniors don't understand that abstraction and fuck it up while learning but making abstraction a dirty word is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

  > Eventually everyone starts copy-pasting crap

Which is a horrendous way to write code.

[theshrike79]

Locking behavior with tests isn't the same as comprehensive and foolproof tests. They might not cover every edge case, but will fail if the happy path starts failing for some reason.

And yes, copy-pasting is a horrendous way to write code, but everyone does it.

When you're adding the 1600th CRUD endpoint of your career to an enterprise Java/C# application, can you with all honesty say you will type every single character with the same thought and consideration every time?

Or do you just make one, copy-paste that one and modify accordingly?

Or if you write 20 unit tests with slight alterations you masterfully craft every single character to perfection?

I have a limited amount of energy to use every day, I choose to use it in places that matter. The hard bits that LLMs and copy-pasting can't speed up.