If you are a company founder, what scenario would you rather find yourself in?

a) a pristine, good codebase that follows the best coding practices, but it is built on top of bad specs, wrong data/domain model

b) a bad codebase but it correctly models and nails the domain model for your business case

Real life example, a fintech with:

a) a great codebase but stuck with a single-entry ledger

b) a bad codebase that perfectly implements a double-entry ledger

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SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago | parent [-]

"Perfectly implements" is doing a lot of work there. Enterprise software is very rarely perfect out of the box, and the issue with bad code is that it can make it extraordinarily hard to solve simple problems. I have personally seen tech-debt induced scenarios where "I want a new API to edit this field in an object" and "Let's do a dependency upgrade" respectively became multi-month projects.

	▲	reese_john 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Perfectly implements" is doing a lot of work there. Enterprise software is very rarely perfect out of the box Fair, by “perfectly implements” I meant to say that it correctly implemented the core invariant of a double entry ledger (debits = credits), not that it was 100% bug free