[hinkley]

I find that many analogies that seem not to hold water actually hold a lot of water, frequently including some the purveyor hoped it wouldn’t.

“Low hanging fruit” is about as stupid an idea if you understand how to make performant systems as it is if you own a mature fruit tree. Going for the low hanging fruit on a real tree grants you the biggest mess. Neither domain works the way idiots pretending to be enlightened think it does. And you can paint a sane picture in both if you know wtf you’re talking about, even a little.

Similarly, what the home improvement industry has taught me is that you can build a house with siding and a roof for about 10% of the cost of the finished house. This house will keep you dry. It will not keep you warm or clothed and feed you. For that you need plumbing, wiring, ceilings, walls, insulation, and finally flooring. These are intensely labor intensive jobs, and if you 1) learn a few of them and 2) know the right people, you can build things to code and pay someone only to sign off on them. Drywalling doesn’t even require that, but it’s a shitload of work.

So yes, in fact you can build an MVP of the house. It’s just the bones and a couple of the most obvious features. And if you live in an old enough house, it’s been refactored and retrofitted so many times that you can’t tell that it used to look a exactly like five other houses within a block radius of your house. And so did all you’re neighbors’.