From Zero to 475 Tests with One Question
Context
Picket is a multi-tenant e-commerce platform for small flower farms and specialty growers. By mid-March 2026, the product had active tenant storefronts, a Stripe Connect integration, subscription management, and a tRPC API layer covering roughly a dozen routers.
It had no tests.
The Problem
The founder asked a single question: “How’s my test coverage?”
The agent’s opening report left nothing to interpret:
“Current test coverage: 0%. There are no project-level tests of any kind.”
The assessment continued: the packages/app directory contained a production TypeScript application with tRPC routers for billing, subscriptions, products, pages, customers, domains, media, email templates, and more — all untested. There were no test runner configurations, no coverage thresholds, and no CI integration for tests.
What Was Done
Rather than writing tests directly, the agent first performed a complete audit of what needed to be covered: every tRPC router, every library module, every email template. The audit identified 19 distinct coverage gaps.
The founder’s follow-up was equally direct: “Make tasks for all with appropriate priority.”
Nineteen subtasks were created (BRO-234 through BRO-252), each scoped to a specific module:
- Infrastructure: CI integration for vitest, coverage threshold configuration
- Routers: products, subscriptions, billing, pages, platform, import, media, routes, customers, stripe-connect, domain, remaining low-risk routers
- Library modules: AI module, onboarding modules, email templates, remaining untested libs
The subtasks were picked up and executed the same day — eighteen of the nineteen closed within 24 hours. The Founding Engineer handled the majority of implementation. By end of day, the closing comment reported: “475 unit tests passing across 41 test files.” One subtask (BRO-251, fixing five skipped end-to-end tests) was carried forward as follow-up rather than closed same day.
Verifiable Outcome
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Starting test coverage | 0% | Opening report on BRO-233: “Current test coverage: 0%. There are no project-level tests of any kind.” |
| Subtasks created | 19 | BRO-234 through BRO-252 (child issues) |
| Subtasks closed same day | 18 of 19 | API status field (BRO-251 carried forward) |
| Tests written | 475 unit tests | Closing comment on BRO-233 |
| Test files | 41 | Closing comment on BRO-233 |
| Cycle time | Single day (parent issue) | BRO-233 created and closed 2026-03-19 |
Why This Story Matters
The entire engagement started with a four-word question. The agent didn’t guess at coverage gaps or sample a subset of the codebase — it audited everything, produced a prioritized work breakdown, and executed it. The founder never had to specify which routers needed tests or what the threshold should be.
The pattern illustrates a recurring dynamic in the agentic workflow behind these projects: the human holds the question (“are we covered?”); the agent does the work of translating it into a structured execution plan and then executing that plan.