Better with Kent - durable skills for people who ship software.

Every morning Kent wakes up to a PR that deletes more lines than it adds. Not flaky tests. Not broken tests. Low-signal ones — tiny wrappers, magic-number asserts, edge cases that will never happen — the kind AI agents love to generate overnight.

This episode walks the trap (more green checks ≠ more confidence), the bar (fewer, longer tests written into testing-principles.md), a real cleanup PR (kody#603: +122 / −703), and the Cursor Automation that runs Keep Tests Tight at 03:00 MDT.

Homework: run the cleanup once. Give an agent your testing principles and see what it deletes.

Chapters

• 0:00 — Cold open: I delete tests every night
• 0:15 — Better with Kent intro
• 0:33 — Every morning a PR that deletes more than it adds
• 1:04 — More tests are not better tests
• 2:03 — Tests are expensive to run / change
• 2:33 — Agents love tiny tests (magic number 42)
• 3:33 — Green checks are not confidence
• 4:33 — Screen: testing-principles.md
• 5:09 — Fewer, longer tests
• 7:10 — Screen: kody#603 demo
• 8:38 — Screen: Keep Tests Tight automation
• 11:32 — Valuable at the time is not keep forever
• 11:45 — Homework: run the cleanup once
• 12:19 — Close: delete some more tests

Links

• kody testing-principles.md
• kody#603 — trim low-signal community suites
• Keep Tests Tight automation
• Better with Kent