Antony Marcano | Substack
Antony Marcano
Taming rogue AI coding agents, one automated test at a time... while helping companies achieve the “Elite” benchmark in DORA software delivery performance – with or without AI
Launched 2 months ago
Antony Marcano
@antonymarcano
Out of the box, without considerable guidance, Claude, Codex, etc. write absolutely terrible, hacky, "spaghetti code".
If that's not been your experience, maybe that's the style of code you've been exposed to before. Or maybe this is the first code you've ever seen. That's ok. There's always something better to see and learn from.
While I was creating coding skills for Claude, it decided to tell me one day that what I was trying to do in the name of Test-Driven Development (TDD) was more like Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD).
Typically, it was confidently wrong. Unfortunately, this is primarily because most people are confidently wrong on this topic too.
What (almost) Everyone Gets Wrong About TDD & BDD
Could your next Claude Code skill be a diagram? Not a diagram just describing the skill — a diagram that is the skill, executed like code. The answer is yes.
Once you've tried it, like me, you may not want to go back.
PlantUML based Claude Skill definitions… Enjoy!
Full article with token usage, performance, and reliability coming soon! But for now, have a play…
github.com\
stagentic-promptbook/README.md at main · stagentic/stagentic-promptbook\
PlantUML powered Claude Skill. Contribute to stagentic/stagentic-promptbook development by creating an account on GitHub.
Tomorrow (Wednesday), at the AI Agents Montreal online meetup, I'll be demonstrating a test-driven approach to developing agent 'behaviours' - e.g. developing SKILL .md files, test-first.
I was stuck in a “change and pray” loop, changing claude.md and skill.md files. Fix one behaviour, break another without even knowing. A new problem… with an old solution.
antonymarcano.substack.com/p/taming-claude-code…
If you've seen my posts on taking a test-driven approach to developing Claude skills, this was my first demo of the concept. A lot has changed since then but this is the essence of it…