In a startup, especially early, the only thing that isn't optional is shipping. You can fix any and all issues later, first you have to ensure there is a 'later'. (That's not to say you shouldn't do it at all, but definitely focus on the business before the tech.)

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rmoriz 5 days ago | parent [-]

I‘ve been with a couple of startups that shipped and not a single one was cutting corners in this area anymore. Last time I saw this was probably around 2005-2008.

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bcrosby95 5 days ago | parent [-]

Cutting corners here is one of the worst decisions you can make. Especially in an environment where you don't know your end product and you're likely to rework your code over and over and over again.

Piling shit on top of shit only pays off on very short time scales - like a month or two. Because once you revisit that shit code all your time savings are out the window. If you have to revisit it more than once you probably slowed yourself down already.

	▲	rmoriz 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		And you can add an AI code agent (Copilot, Opencode, Claude) to the workflow just to deal with failing tests, automatically create PRs to fix the issues. It may boost the productivity a lot doing housekeeping while coding manually.