Yep, it's great for generating tests and so much of that is boilerplate that it feels great value. As a super lazy developer it's great as the burden of all that mechanical 'stuff' being spat out is nice. Test code being like baggage feels lighter when it's just churned out as part of the process, as in no guilt just to delete it all when what you want to do changes. That in itself is nice. Plus of course MCP things (Playwright etc) for integration things is great.

But like you said, it was meant more TDD as 'test first' - so a sort of 'prompt-as-spec' that then produces the test/spec code first, and then go iterate on that. The code design itself is different as influenced by how it is prompted to be testable. So rather than go 'prompt -> code' it's more an in-between stage of prompting the test initially and then evolve, making sure the agent is part of the game of only writing testable code and automating the 'gate' of passes before expanding something. 'prompt -> spec -> code' repeat loop until shipped.

The only thing I dislike is what it chooses to test when asked to just "generate tests for X": it often chooses to build those "straitjacket for your code" style tests which aren't actually useful in terms of catching bugs, they just act as "any change now makes this red"

As a simple example, a "buildUrl" style function that put one particular host for prod and a different host for staging (for an "environment" argument) had that argument "tested" by exactly comparing the entire functions return string, encoding all the extra functionality into it (that was tested earlier anyway).

A better output would be to check startsWith(prodHost) or similar, which is what I changed it into, but I'm still trying to work out how to get coding agents to do that in the first or second attempt.

But that's also not surprising: people write those kinds of too-narrow not-useful tests all the time, the codebase I work on is littered with them!