Quickest way to get a test suite so tightly coupled to structure rather than behavior that even just looking at the tests wrong makes them fail. But technically you do get test coverage I guess. Goodhart’s law in action.

Every big change is ultimately just a series of small changes. It takes skill and engineering chops to be able to break up big ideas into small steps with quick feedback loops, but it can be done. Usually worth the effort too.

Unfortunately, often that’s a complex idea so it can be somewhere on the order of an hour before they stop coding and try compiling.

Maybe I’ve been lucky with the people I got to work with so far (and I definitely am), but I know of no professional software engineer that would voluntarily subject themselves to such a long feedback loop. I guess some of the juniors try to work this way sometimes, but they learn fairly quickly not to. The best ones I know work incrementally. Small change, run, small change run, and so on.