Prototype vs TDD: When to Explore Throwaway and When to Go Test-First

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The same idea can be built two radically different ways inside the Matt Pocock skills family, and picking wrong wastes a day. Prototype makes you write throwaway code that answers one question and then throw it away. TDD makes you lock behavior down test-first, from the first line. Both live in mattpocock/skills (223K stars), both rank in the top ~15 on skills.sh, and both solve “turn an idea into code” — but they’re built for opposite moments. I read the actual SKILL.md files for prototype, tdd, to-spec, implement, and code-review, and the boundary between them is sharper than the descriptions suggest.

Engineering Workflow on Top AI Skills

Prototype vs TDD: When to Explore Throwaway and When to Go Test-First