I drank the Kool-Aid and I still like the flavor. I still practice TDD every day. And yet I agree with most of what you said. When people get dogmatic about

I drank the Kool-Aid and I still like the flavor. I still practice TDD every day. And yet I agree with most of what you said. When people get dogmatic about unit tests, they write way more than is needed to bring value. The value is: you can refactor code more easily; you can think things through a little bit at a time and let the design evolve; the code you write tends to be really simple and easy to understand; you get executable documentation of code as a side-effect. And for me, a huge benefit is that when pair-programming, the current test defines the current task. If the unit tests are making the code harder to refactor and evolve, then it's time to write fewer of them. And if unit testing isn't fun, then something is seriously wrong. Do people not know that when you want to just explore a wild design idea, you should abandon unit testing and just go wild?