alt Hacker NewsThat's a refutation of agile, Vibe Coding and the last 25 years of the software industry.
One of my own quality metrics that almost everyone rejects is a "a good design is a design where a change that seems like a small change to management is... a small change"
It plays out like this. To get to product-market fit you are going to have to zig and zag 20 times. Everybody optimizes for the first step of this journey and then on the second step they optimize for that... and by step 5 or so the archiecture is exhausted and you have no hope of getting to step 20. The rare team that is looking ahead 20 steps is the one that survives.
The problem is that you don't know in advance what the 20 steps will be, and you may spend time solving the wrong problem.
Make step 1 as simple as possible, step 1 is small and changes are cheap, you can even rewrite everything with little effort, no need to prepare for anything at this point.
Step 2-4 will inevitably break something, no big deal, rewrite the parts that need to be rewritten, it is still cheap.
At step 5 rewrites are starting to get costly, but now you have a better idea of what is here to stay, so it is now time to invest in things like regression testing, style guides, etc...
At step 10, you have quite a history, rewrites become a really bad idea, no turning back after that. So now it is time to think about the future. The difference from doing that in step 1 is that you now have 10 steps of experience and only need to look ahead 10 steps.