[ioddly]

I've done this once ever, I was being asked to build an extremely technically difficult proof of concept so I asked for access and it was granted. I had already worked for the client previously so there was some trust, and they were thinking of open sourcing the project once it was farther along anyway. I wouldn't expect to have it happen again.

I feel like most of these problems can probably be sussed out in other ways. Ask the developers about things that typically lead to a better codebase: do they do code review, testing, QA, etc.