The most important SWE foundation
I believe software development fundamentals are important, even in the age of coding AI, and will be for a long time.
The data backs me up. Pretty much every industry study that looks at the question, plus a growing stream of reports from technology professionals, more or less unanimously support the same conclusion:
The better your core software engineering skillset, the more productive you are at creating quality solutions using AI coding agents.
The key words being "productive" and "quality". We all know it's easy to use AI to look busy while accomplishing nothing useful, or to pump out crap-ware that will become a nightmare to fix in 6 months, or filled with subtle errors you won't know about until your customer is screaming at you.
But I assume you have higher standards than that.
And it's worth asking:
What is the most important software-development foundation to focus on? That will give you the biggest benefits quickest, especially using AI tools?
My enthusiastic answer:
Test-driven development.
This has always been important for professional software dev...
But it's interesting to note that coding agents are helpless unless the can run automated tests.
They operate in what is called the agentic loop, which can only exit when the coding agent decides it has accomplished the goal. But it relies on you to precisely tell it:
-
What the boundary conditions are
-
The tolerance for errors, if any, and of what kind
-
The edge cases that are important to check and maintain
-
The invariants and constraints on the product and the codebase
-
How to handle integrations with 3rd-party APIs, and what to do when they misbehave
-
Ensuring bugs are not only fixed, but stay fixed
All of which is exactly what test-driven development does.
And why it's more important than any other software development concept (OOP, algorithms, etc.) right now.
Reply and tell me your opinion. Do you agree with my praise of TDD? Or do you think other fundamentals are more important?
If you want to learn to use TDD better, especially with more modern AI-coding requirements, go here: