And particularly the “no tests go faster”.

I feel like we keep having to reestablish known facts every two years in this field.

I think your comment is just as "insane" as the practice you are railing against. Although I wouldn't use the word "insane" - it's hyperbole. What's the right word here? I'm not sure... "dogmatic" isn't quite right.

If you are a two man startup, burning through runway and pre-product-market fit... then spending a lot of time on tests is questionable (although the cost-benefit now with AI is changing very fast).

What I find "insane", "dogmatic"... about your comment is the complete elision of this process of cost-benefit analysis, as if there should never be such an analysis.

I've worked with a lot of people like you. When a discussion begins about a choice to be made, they just stampede in with "THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY". And the discussion can't even be had.

This sort of "dogmatism" is so rife if engineering culture, I wonder if this is why the c-suite is so ready to dump us all for AI centaurs that just fucking ship features. How many of them got burned listening to engineers who refused to perform even the most basic of cost benefit analyses with the perspective of the business as a whole in mind and forced the most unnecessary, over-engineered bullshit.

I worked at one startup where the tech lead browbeat the founders into building this enormous microservice monster that took them years. They had ONE dev team, ONE customer, and the only feature actually being used was just a single form (which was built so badly it took seconds to type a single character in a field cause the React re-renders were crazy).

Now THAT's insanity.

Yea I stopped reading at this point