For certain kinds of tasks, where I can see pretty clearly going into it what the outcome needs to look like, TDD actually speeds things up for me. It lets me

For certain kinds of tasks, where I can see pretty clearly going into it what the outcome needs to look like, TDD actually speeds things up for me. It lets me program more 'boldly' in some ways. However, the really interesting tasks are those where the actual problem is hard to understand well enough to write tests up front. In those cases, I usually just iterate as fast as possible in various directions until I can see the likely path forward, which allows tests to be written, and then proper code written to make the tests pass.