[danjac]

It's kind of like trying to save time on a marathon by not stopping to tie your shoelaces.

I mean it takes maybe a day or two at most to set up a CI/CD pipeline with Github actions or something similar. It takes maybe a day to set up test runners, and you can just sprinkle in small tests as you go. There are plenty of templates you can find depending on your language/platform that do most of this out of the box.

You don't need a perfect pipeline or test coverage, just something you can improve on incrementally. It's much, much harder to do all this on top of a bloated legacy codebase and infrastructure and that's when "adding CI/CD" becomes a Big Project that we'll get to real soon now.

[arwhatever]

I love your shoelaces analogy.

I’ve expressed it as sprinting forward as fast as you can while looking straight down at your feet - which is basically the exact same sentiment.

Of course there’s always “stopping to sharpen one’s saw”

A new I came up with myself “removing the stoplights hoping it will end rush hour sooner ...”

[brudgers]

A startup doesn’t have a known course with a finish line and competing forces defined by rules.

A startup is running from a grizzly bear and tying your shoe laces is an engineering decision. There are important tradeoffs and potential bad outcomes either way.