I'm in camp 1 too. I've maintained projects developed with that mindset. It's fine! Your job is to make the thing work, not take on its quality as part of your personal identity.

If it's harder to work with, it's harder to work with, it's not the end of the world. At least it exists, which it probably wouldn't have if developed with "camp 2" tendencies.

I think camp 2 would rather see one beautiful thing than ten useful things.

I think camp 1 would rather see ten useless things than one useful thing.

> I think camp 2 would rather see one beautiful thing than ten useful things.

Unashamedly, I would, but this is a false dilemma. We can have ten beautiful and useful things.

The thing that drives the camp 2 folk crazy is that often it would have taken no extra effort (or perhaps even less effort overall) to make a good version of the thing but the people who made thing simply couldn't be bothered.

The attitude you're describing here has led directly to our world being full of profoundly disappointing objects that proliferate because they meet a minimum bar of usefulness.

People don't like the minimum bar. They'll take it if it's the only thing on offer, but they like better things.

I don't get how camp 1 can ship more than one version (do they jump teams/companies each time?). If your code is immovable mess then how do you add features/fix bugs in time?

I think I fall in camp 1.5 (I don't fall in camp 1 or camp 2) as in I can see value in prototyping (with AI) and sometimes make quick scripts when I need them, but long term I would like to grow with an idea and build something genuinely nice from those prototypes, even manually writing the code as I found personally, AI codebases are an hassle to manage and have many bugs especially within important things (@iamcalledrob message here sums it up brilliantly as well)

> I think camp 2 would rather see one beautiful thing than ten useful things.

Both beautiful and useful are subjective (imo). Steve job's adding calligraphy to computer fonts could've considered a thing of beauty which derived from his personal relation to calligraphy, but it also is an really useful thing.

It's my personal opinion that some of the most valuable innovations are both useful and beautiful (elegant).

Of course, there are rough hacks sometimes but those are beautiful in their own way as well. Once again, both beauty and usefulness is subjective.

(If you measure Usefulness with the profit earned within a purely capitalistic lens, what happens is that you might do layoffs and you might degrade customer service to get to that measure, which ultimately reduces the usefulness. profit is a very lousy measure of usefulness in my opinion. We all need profit though but doing solely everything for profit also feels a bit greedy to me.)

> At least it exists, which it probably wouldn't have if developed with "camp 2" tendencies.

Ah yes, if you aren't shitting code out the door as fast as possible, you're probably not shipping anything at all.

You are not your job. Take pride in your work. Be kind to others. This is the true path.

> If it's harder to work with, it's harder to work with, it's not the end of the world.

Yeah it just takes longer and makes you miserable in the process. No biggie!