[asiachick]

So I just hacked together an animated LED strip lamp on an Arduino. I didn't write any tests or setup production. What would you have done?

To me, "I write my first line of code as if it's going to be on production forever" means setting up a testing infrastructure, a reproducible build that can be automated, a CI that runs my tests. An auto-commit system where I can create a PR and submit it to the CI and if it passes it will automatically get merged to main, etc...

Instead of my lamp project taking 1-3 hrs it would have been a week of setting all this up before I was ready to write my first line of actual code.

Are you saying you'd actually take that week? Would you therefore never write something on shadertoy because it's missing all that infrastructure and you can't write code as if it's going to be in production forever?