TDD Was Solving the Agent Problem Before Agents Existed
· 4 min read
The first time I set an agent loose on a real codebase, it ran out of context before it had done anything useful. That's a clarifying experience.
The repository wasn't exotic — a Python monorepo with shared libraries and some infrastructure code. I drew a diagram to understand what was happening. A rectangle for the full context window; blocks for what was already consumed just from loading the codebase: directory tree, CLAUDE.md, relevant modules, config, dependencies. The bar was more than half full before the agent had read a single line of task context or seen a single error message.