Thing is, as we all know, prototypes rarely make it to the trash bin if managers and product owners have a stake in the project. Which becomes an even bigger problem now that minimal amounts of humans are involved in producing said prototypes.
I had a meeting with a customer who proudly proclaimed they do “full-on agentic coding” at their startup, and one of their developers mentioned their entire codebase has been rewritten three times in the past week before the meeting took place. I do not have high hopes for their project ever being refactored by humans involved in anything else than light UAT before customer demo time.
At one of my previous jobs, I was maintaining the product that people prototyped for themselves to check if the idea they’re going to build actually works under high load, it was full of parts that were added only and exclusively as stubs for the simulation. The idea ended up being feasible so they said to managers that they can start working on the product, and reserved an answer that there is no need, the product is already sold to clients and they just need to package it and write documentation. Eventually they had to hire a whole department so we can actually build an app that was already sold and shipped.
Thing is, as we all know, prototypes rarely make it to the trash bin if managers and product owners have a stake in the project. Which becomes an even bigger problem now that minimal amounts of humans are involved in producing said prototypes.
I had a meeting with a customer who proudly proclaimed they do “full-on agentic coding” at their startup, and one of their developers mentioned their entire codebase has been rewritten three times in the past week before the meeting took place. I do not have high hopes for their project ever being refactored by humans involved in anything else than light UAT before customer demo time.
At one of my previous jobs, I was maintaining the product that people prototyped for themselves to check if the idea they’re going to build actually works under high load, it was full of parts that were added only and exclusively as stubs for the simulation. The idea ended up being feasible so they said to managers that they can start working on the product, and reserved an answer that there is no need, the product is already sold to clients and they just need to package it and write documentation. Eventually they had to hire a whole department so we can actually build an app that was already sold and shipped.