[JoelMcCracken]

This is one of the things I keep thinking about. At the very least, these tools make prototyping and idea vetting remarkably cheaper.

Then we go back to the old “the prototype works; I’m the boss and I’m telling you to deploy it to production”

[saalweachter]

There's like three groups of developers you need:

The prototypers, who move fast and break things, who throw together shiny first versions that look great and work some of the time;

The architects, who take the prototypes and take the time to build it correctly;

And the gardeners, who maintain the built system for the next 10-30 years, fixing bugs, making incremental improvements to speed or resource usage, and updating dependencies so that it continues to function on modern machines.

The crazy thing is that there are a ton of developers with different tastes who would love to fill each of the roles, but not many companies that are able to manage all three types without pushing everyone into one bucket.

[olvy0]

Ha, I'm a gardener then, on my 15th year of maintenance. So halfway there according to you. Slowly, very slowly, fixing the thousands of bugs the rockstar left behind 15 years ago.

[saalweachter]

It's easy to look at a newly made garden, its flowers all freshly planted and its paths all neatly laid out, and think it finished, but once you see one that's been carefully maintained for decades and how its plants have matured and grown together and how the steps have been worn by human feet, it's clear the project is merely off to a good start.

[bjertoref]

This comment made me imagine what would the guy maintaining my first deployed project at my first company thinks about me. Never had this thought ever cross my mind.

[TonyStr]

This is such a great mental model.

[rzmmm]

Prototyping is widely underappreciated. People think it's waste to throw away stuff but it's more costly to build upon shoddy foundations

[bluGill]

The problem is those shoddy foundations can support a lot of weight before they finally fail. A prototype you write in a day - not a big deal to throw away. However if you have been working for a while that is a lot of effort/money.

Worse, often you need to spend years before you realize how an initial design decision was a mistake - not only are you proposing to throw away millions of dollars worth of work - you also don't know that your proposed better design is really better.

[karmakurtisaani]

The day you implement the first edge case to your prototype you basically commit to using it forever or spending a lot of money to replace it.

[shrikant]

Well, there's nothing as permanent as a temporary solution...

[karmakurtisaani]

"So we all agree this is not ideal, but let's use it for now and focus on ..."

Heard it so many times.

[bluGill]

More than half the time it is correct - until you figure out those things you are asking to focus on you won't know what really works. Going for ideal now just means when you get to those things you discover another thing you hadn't thought of in advance and so you are no better off.

Experienced developers in a domain can sometimes anticipate the issues, but experience only comes from failing.

The real answer is allowing some budget to fix things and then fixing them as you go along.

[darkwater]

But... "time to market!", "we won't have cash by the time this gets implemented properly" etc etc are the usual suspects here.

[conductr]

Sounds like valid issues to me. Pristine software isn’t the objective of most businesses. Leaving as a problem for another day, if we’re lucky that day will come, for many businesses, products, and startups it doesn’t and the shoddy prototype usually isn’t to blame.

I feel like SWE’s that make this gripe really need to step back and understand their role and the process for value creation. Because it’s certainly a process, the quality of code/architecture matters little if the low bar of functionality is met. Functionality can be sold to customers or used to test the market. It’s basically the whole MVP thing and the MVP should be a bit jank. If it wasn’t, you spent too much time/effort on it.

All said, there’s definitely some approaches to make it less jank from day one. Unfortunately, jankiness is a subjective metric.

[skydhash]

It’s not about pristine software. Customers expect something that works. But changes will then be requested and the expectation is that the software will continue working. It’s hard to do that with janky code.

If you have a good architecture and keep good code hygiene, then velocity is easy. Without that, everything will slow to a crawl.

[rob74]

> If you have a good architecture and keep good code hygiene

That's a big "if" however - customers have a tendency to come up with requirements that aren't covered (or only covered in awkward ways) by the architecture you envisioned initially, while many of the well-architected parts will remain unused.

[skydhash]

Then redesign the architecture. No need to go for a full rewrite as it can be done progressively. One thing I’ve seen is that people can be afraid to delete code, even if it’s not used anywhere.

[mapleleaf1921]

I agree, but I think you've not understood what the reply above is saying.

You will never get the chance of "customers requesting changes" if you never ship.

The company with the janky code that shipped will. And they will iterate and get better - as described by your process.

[skydhash]

> You will never get the chance of "customers requesting changes" if you never ship.

Why does good code imply never shipping?

Managers and Developers have different thresholds for “good enough to release”. The former are not the one on call for bugs or the one that get blamed for outage, but they are the ones that get praised when projects are completed quickly. Anything that’s past demo level is good for them.

[6510]

I don't think I've ever not learned a better way to write something after writing it. Sometimes it's small and insignificant, sometimes it "forces" me to start over. The funniest is when more than half the code deals with something that won't happen. The banana that is not a fruit clause.

[baxtr]

100% - one of the biggest advantages of software is its mutability, so why not use it to prototype properly?

[skydhash]

You can prototype UX with a tools like balsamiq or taking photos of paper sketches with paper-to-app application. No need for code to share an idea. Especially from business to engineering or vice-versa.

Product Managers coding is like Developers writing marketing pitches.

[theK]

Why not? I've seen both sides working out remarkably well. It is much more of a mindset thing than anything else.

[SkyBelow]

One of the major concerns with prototyping, at least in my experience and based on the general vibe I've felt from others over the years, is that clients will generally do some variation of "You have a working prototype? So how many days until it is prod ready? No more than a few weeks, right?" and that will be their expectation. AI makes prototyping easier, but makes this specific drawback much worse. Expectations are going to be misaligned, leading to many disappointments, and likely some number of developers taking undue negative outcomes. I'm not even sure if it will normalize to reasonable expectations, given that this tension never seemed resolved even before AI was in the mix.