Sometimes. It depends on what you’re working on.

Part of the fun challenge in writing software is that the act of programming can teach you that you’re wrong at every level. The syntax can be wrong. The algorithm you’re implementing can be wrong. The way you’re designing a module can be misguided. And you might be solving the wrong problem entirely! Like, maybe you spend weeks adding a feature to a game and it makes the game less fun! Oops!

Tests formalise beliefs about what you want your code to do, at some level of abstraction. But if those beliefs turn out to be wrong, the tests themselves become a headwind when you try and refactor. You want those early refactoring to be as easy as possible while you’re learning a problem space.

Now, some programs don’t suffer from this as much. If you’re implementing a C compiler or drop in replacement for grep, you have some clear acceptance tests that will almost certainly not change through your project’s lifecycle.

But not all problems have clear constraints like that. Sometimes you’re inventing a programming language. Or writing a game. Or making a user interface. In my opinion, problems that are fully constrained from the start are some of the least interesting to work on. Where’s the discovery?