prototypes/mvp's often become the production version

And their spreadsheets don't?

[dead]

This seems to be the default path which is encouraged/suggested lately, only happy path until you acquire customers

I think it’s fairly normal at least in my career - rush to ship something, lots of “we’ll polish this later,” two years go by, get called into vp/cto/whoever’s office when the debt comes calling like “what the fuck why is this like this???” and I have to say “that ‘later’ we decided is now I guess”

The script I have fairly seen being played is where the one doing MVP gets rewarded and moves on with a promotion. The weight of completing and stabilizing the MVP falls on some one else who is not vocal enough in terms of influence. Ironically the flashy MVP does not includes monitoring, logging, security, edge-cases, CI-CD, DR, scaling which is why vibe coding is getting so popular and everyone seems to be under the impression that engineers are not needed anymore.

...and are often still in place when the "magic guy who built it" left long time ago...