Most proof of concepts I've seen get traction turned into production.

A rewrite?

I recall a few times everyone promised, if this gets promoted then we will rewrite it from zero. Never happened.

The article touches on responsability, accountability. There is none for risk taker. By definition. You have a crazy idea, you rush it out, you hope clients bite. You profit. It's not even your problem how to make it work, scale, not cost more to run than we sell it for.

The loop on the right. There are companies, two of them are very popular these days, they took it to an extreme. You ship something fast, and since it only scales linearly you go raise money. Successful companies, countless users, some of them even pay. Who's to blame? The senior developer, or simply someone reasonable who asks, how's that sustainable, what's the way out of this? Those are fired, so whoever's left is a believer.

I recall a few times everyone promised, if this gets promoted then we will rewrite it from zero. Never happened.

Why would you do that though? If you have a working 'prototype' that's handling the demand, has the required features, and doesn't really need to be rebuilt (except to appease the sensibilities of the developers), why would you spend time and effort on that? That makes no sense. The fact it's a prototype or a 'proof of concept' is essentially irrelevant if you can't enumerate what the actual problem with it is.

I work with a bunch of teams that complain that they're mired in tech debt all the time, and complain that it's a huge risk and it slows them down. Except I can see our incidents log and there aren't many incidents and none that can be attributed to running risky code in prod, I have our risk register that has no 'this code is old and rubbish and has past-EOL dependencies on it', and no team has ever managed to articulate how or even how much the tech debt slows them down. They shouldn't really claim to be surprised that no one wants them to spend time 'fixing' a problem that apparently has no impact.

I've also seen the opposite case where a team spent months refactoring an app that they wrote before it launches. They wrote it, then decided they could make it 'better', and spent loads of time reworking most of it before it launched. All the value was delayed because they decided they didn't like their own work. And obviously the leadership team were pissed off about that, and now there's very little trust left.

There should be a good conversation about delivery of work between teams and stakeholders or no one will be happy, but if that isn't happening the stakeholders will always win.

This is why you need sufficiently senior engineering leadership (both IC leadership and management). If you have engineers who meekly do whatever a non-technical stakeholder asks then you have a vacuum of responsibility, and sooner or later things will blow up catastrophically and whoever was least adept at CYA will get blamed.

On the other hand, almost any business problem can be solved in a reasonable way that doesn't send your system through any terrible one-way doors if you zoom out enough and ask enough whys. Of course not every place allows engineering to do that, but the ones that don't aren't able to retain senior folks because they will just go somewhere where their judgment is valued. Sometimes technical debt is the right thing for the business, but sufficiently senior engineers can set things up so there is always a way out. But what you can't do is uphold the purity of the system above the business problem. The systems are paid for by the business, so if you lose sight of that then you've lost the plot and the basis for your influence.

> recall a few times everyone promised, if this gets promoted then we will rewrite it from zero. Never happened.

Old quote: "There is nothing so permanents as a temporary hack."

This problem definitely predates AI coding agents, though it may be exacerbated by them. The article essentially concludes with the ancient advice of "plan to throw one away". Well sure, I also read Mythical Man Month, but how do I convince the decision-makers?

Thats why you gotta write them in a language nobody else on the team has heard of.