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How is that different from agile, TDD and refactoring?

> A steel thread is a very thin slice of functionality that threads through a software system. They are called a “thread” because they weave through the various parts of the software system and implement an important use case.

This sounds awfully like spaghetti code.

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It seems possible to do agile, TDD, and/or refactoring all without this practice of “following a single use case from start to finish throughout the entire application”. That’s all this is, an evocative name for the suggestion that taking a single use case through the entire system from beginning to end, implementing just what’s necessary at each step, is a good way to program.

I think it has benefits but you also hit on the biggest risk, if you aren’t careful you’ll end up writing spaghetti code, except now your spaghetti is made of steel which is way harder to untangle.

It's not spaghetti, it forces you to think about how the various layers are going to integrate, with a real-world testcase before you've written so much code that making corrections necessary to fix any abstraction errors you have made is painful.

Or - it sounds like spaghetti, but ordered into a sounder structure

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