Overview
This tutorial teaches developers how to get AI coding agents to generate high-quality Python tests. The key insight is that coding agents learn best from existing examples - they naturally adopt the patterns and quality of tests already in your project without needing explicit prompting.
What You’ll Learn
- Use existing tests as templates - agents automatically pick up patterns from your current test suite without extra prompting
- Reference external codebases by having agents clone and imitate testing patterns from well-tested projects
- Leverage pytest’s rich ecosystem - agents understand pytest-specific tools like fixtures, parametrize, and mocking libraries
- Refactor duplicate setup code using pytest fixtures and parametrize decorators to maintain clean test structure
- Monitor for anti-patterns like excessive code duplication in test setup, though some duplication is acceptable in tests
Prerequisites
Basic Python and pytest knowledge. An existing Python project with some test coverage works best.