tdd-helper

What This Skill Does

The tdd-helper is a specialized utility designed to enforce strict Test-Driven Development (TDD) workflows for non-deterministic AI agents. In environments where agents might otherwise skip testing or rush directly to implementation, this skill acts as a rigorous gatekeeper. It wraps your execution environment, preventing the agent from running production-ready code until it has authored and passed a corresponding test suite. By mandating a 'Red-Green-Refactor' cycle, it ensures that your codebase remains stable, verifiable, and free of untested logic, effectively turning an autonomous agent into a disciplined software engineer.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/cerbug45/agents-skill-tdd-helper

Once installed, you can configure the behavior via environment variables or a local JSON configuration file to suit your specific project requirements, such as custom test directories or strict linting standards.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for teams managing autonomous AI agents that handle continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Use it when you are building complex systems where regression errors are costly. It is also perfect for scaffolding new features in a sandbox, as the agent is forced to validate edge cases before the code is merged into the main branch. Furthermore, it serves as an excellent guardrail for junior-level AI models that have a tendency to hallucinate solutions rather than building them incrementally.

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, please use tdd-helper to implement a new API authentication module for our backend service, ensuring all edge cases are covered by tests first."
2. "I need to refactor the database connector; please run the tdd-helper, enforce strict linting, and do not execute the production update until all unit tests pass."
3. "tdd-helper: execute the task in the current directory and ensure no code is written to main.py unless a corresponding test passes in tests/test_module.py."

Tips & Limitations

To maximize the effectiveness of this tool, ensure your repository has a clearly defined test directory. While the tdd-helper prevents skipping tests, it cannot judge the quality of the tests themselves; therefore, code reviews are still necessary. Additionally, for very large projects, running the full test suite after every small change may increase latency, so configure your test discovery carefully to target only the relevant modules.