[amag]

This all depends of course of the definition of "cutting corners". Sometimes one person's "cutting corners" is another person's "striving for excellence" and sometimes it's "run project into oblivion".

All too often the short-sighted "quickest" way forward is through copy-paste some code that does something remotely similar and massage it into giving the desired output. Sometimes this is necessary, but a lot of times it is not. And every time it leads to technical debt. I've worked on a lot of code bases like this: "Copy file x, rename copy, add copy to project file, rename global names, massage into y, rinse repeat". And then you find a bug in x.

Developers are typically too far removed from customers to ever know, but often the customer is just using time as a bargaining chip. Everybody wants all their needs filled right this instance but most people are reasonable enough to know that the universe doesn't work that way. You just need to gently remind them of it and they will respect you all the more for it, at least if you then deliver quality on time.

Of course this is harder with customers who believe they know a thing or two about development. In their mind it's just change the output of x, but what they don't know is that because you cut corners in the past, you'll need to change the output in y, z, x2, x3, y2, z3 and zz as well...