Smarter handling of tests and a separate impl command

Today we release CodeSpeak 0.3.7. Please find the full release notes at the end of this post.

Automated tests give coding agents feedback before humans do. This is one of the things that makes agents more autonomous and therefore more useful for completing larger coding tasks.

We've all seen agents being "lazy":

• forgetting to run some tests;
• not writing tests for new functionality;
• declaring the job done while tests are still failing...

As CodeSpeak runs agents under the hood, we try to make sure that they are disciplined about tests, and provide some tools you can use for this. In this release, we complete this set of tools with

• codespeak build now checks if the code generator agent has run all the tests and runs them if it didn't
  • (if you don't want to make sure tests are run and fixed, use codespeak impl instead of build);
• codespeak test runs all tests and makes sure that any failed ones are fixed;
• codespeak test --auto-configure discovers the commands that run tests in your project
  • (you can configure these commands manually in codespeak.json, but our agents seem to be pretty good at doing it for you);
• codespeak coverage collects coverage data, identifies what tests are missing and adds them.

This more granular set of commands gives you more control over your workflow. If you want to iterate in a more quick-and-dirty way, you can run codespeak impl and postpone testing the code more thoroughly. If you want to be sure all tests pass, run codespeak build. If you want to invest into a better test suite, run codespeak coverage which may take a bit longer than the other two.

See the docs for details:

• codespeak build — full build with test enforcement
• codespeak impl — quick implementation without test enforcement
• codespeak test — run and fix tests
• codespeak coverage — improve test coverage
• Improve Test Coverage tutorial — step-by-step walkthrough