TL;DR: I spent a solid month “pair programming” with Claude Code, trying to suspend disbelief and adopt a this-will-be-productive mindset. More specifically, I got Claude to write well over 99% of the code produced during the month. I found the experience infuriating, unpleasant, and stressful before even worrying about its energy impact. Ideally, I would prefer not to do it again for at least a year or two. The only problem with that is that it “worked”. It’s hard to know exactly how well, but I (“we”) definitely produced far more than I would have been able to do unassisted, probably at higher quality, and with a fair number of pretty good tests (about 1500). Against my expectation going in, I have changed my mind. I now believe chat-oriented programming (“CHOP”) can work today, if your tolerance for pain is high enough.
30×50=1500, 50 tests per day is a lot. That is a lot to read and understand all the edge cases, let alone writing them.
30 is assuming you write code for all 30 days. In practice, it’s closer to 20, so 75 tests per day. It’s doable on some days for sure (if we include parameterized tests), but I don’t strictly write code everyday either.
Still, I agree with them that you generally want to write a lot of tests, but volume is less important than quality and thoroughness. The author using the volume alone as a meaningful metric is nonsense.