This still seems like technical debt to me. It's just debt with a much higher compounding interest rate and/or shorter due date. Credit cards vs. traditional loans or mortgages.
>And six months later you discover you’ve built exactly what the spec said — and nothing the customer actually wanted.
That's not a developer problem, it's a PM/business problem. Your PM or equivalent should be neck deep in finding out what to build. Some developers like doing that (likely for free) but they can't spend as much time on it as a PM because they have other responsibilities, so they are not as likely not as good at it.
If you are building POCs (and everyone understands it's a POC), then AI is actually better getting those built as long as you clean it up afterwards. Having something to interact with is still way better than passively staring at designs or mockup slides.
Developers being able to spend less time on code that is helpful but likely to be thrown away is a good thing IMO.
> AI is actually better getting those built as long as you clean it up afterwards
I've never seen a quick PoC get cleaned up. Not once.
I'm sure it happens sometimes, but it's very rare in the industry. The reality is that a PoC usually becomes "good enough" and gets moved into production with only the most perfunctory of cleanup.
The key to every quick POC having a short life, is a reliance on manual work outside of the engineering team.
I want to know more. Can you give an example? :D
This is genius.
One trick for avoiding this is to use artifacts in the PoC that no self-respecting developer would ever allow in production. I use html tables in PoCs because front-end devs hate them - with old-school properties like cellpadding that I know will get replaced.
I also name everything DEMO__ so at least they'll have to go through the exercise or renaming it. Although I've had cases where they don't even do that lol. But at least then you know who's totally worthless.
There is nothing as permanent as a temporary solution!
Yes. Or, "Prototypes have a bad habit of becoming the product".
Bad code isn't Technical Debt, it's an unhedged Call Option
If you search for that quote, you can find #1 result is an AI slop paraphrase published last week, but the original article was 11 years ago, and republished 3 years ago.
https://higherorderlogic.com/programming/2023/10/06/bad-code...