> Ahh, sweet summer child, if I had a nickel for every time I've heard "just hack something together quickly, that's throwaway code", that ended up being a critical lynchpin of a production system - well, I'd probably have at least like a buck or so.

Because this is the first pass on any project, any component, ever. Design is done with iterations. One can and should throw out the original rough lynchpin and replace it with a more robust solution once it becomes evident that it is essential.

If you know that ahead of time and want to make it robust early, the answer is still rarely a single diligent one-shot to perfection - you absolutely should take multiple quick rough iterations to think through the possibility space before settling on your choice. Even that is quite conducive to LLM coding - and the resulting synthesis after attacking it from multiple angles is usually the strongest of all. Should still go over it all with a fine toothed comb at the end, and understand exactly why each choice was made, but the AI helps immensely in narrowing down the possibility space.

Not to rag on you though - you were being tongue in cheek - but we're kidding ourselves if we don't accept that like 90% of the code we write is rough throwaway code at first and only a small portion gets polished into critical form. That's just how all design works though.

I would love to work at the places you have been where you are given enough time to throw out the prototype and do it properly. In my almost 20 years of professional experience this has never been the case and prototype and exploratory code has only been given minimal polishing time before reaching production and in use state.

I'm not sure if I could've said this better