[cynusx]

We are talking about the difference between a functional engineering culture (or mediocre) and a great hackerculture-based culture.

In both cases, the product has to work and be stable however in a mediocre culture the cost of adding features goes up significantly over time, while if you have a really great team then the cost of adding features compresses or remains similar to the early stages.

This mostly comes down to good technology choices, unassuming code, fast tests, optimized developer flow and really solid architectural choices.

I was not talking about plain bad engineering cultures like no testing, modifying code in production, copy-paste development,...