Depends what the exploratory work is. If you know what result you want. It's easy to apply. Assert on the output. If you don't know what you want, you can't a

Depends what the exploratory work is. If you know what result you want. It's easy to apply. Assert on the output. If you don't know what you want, you can't apply it. Because you can't write the asserts. So you can do exploratory implementation as long as you know the result you're looking for. But I'd also argue you want to have an idea about what you want before you start writing code. So I don't find that many places where it doesn't apply. One of the few ones where it doesn't apply is tweaking the UI for looks.