The efficacy of TDD is dependant on language,tooling and experience. You want to spend most of your time writing the problem, AFTER you have thought about it. Developers complain about TDD when they can't think through their problem clearly and use it as a tool to validate bad thinking. TDD in this situation will naturally feel like running in heavy lead boots, since progress will be slow. Very surprised that the test pyramid is not being discussed as much as it should.