Before You Let an Agent Touch Your Code, Write the Tests

The Codebase Nobody Wanted to Touch I inherited a Laravel 9 application — a line-of-business app with complex workflows, role-based access, and third-party integrations. It worked. Users depended on it. And it had exactly zero automated tests. Note: The code examples throughout this series have been made generic to protect the original domain, but they reflect real patterns from a production codebase. Think of them as practical, working examples you can adapt to your own project. No tests. No linting. No CI pipeline. Just a repo, a prayer, and git push origin main. I knew I wanted to use AI coding agents (specifically Claude Code) to accelerate development. But here's the thing about AI agents writing code on a codebase with no tests: you get slop. Fast slop. Confidently wrong slop. An agent without tests is a junior engineer without code review. It'll produce something that looks right, compiles fine, and breaks in production at 2am. So before I let an agent touch a single line, I wro