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It depends on “when” along the timeline of the project.

If we don’t know if anyone will want the product, the quality of the product is less valuable than validation of product market fit.

Later, I care much more about avoiding accidental complexity and having a great technical foundation.

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But you can’t have the technical foundation later because you’ve already built on something else.

Sure you can - you just have to be willing to throw what you have away. If the outcome of that is having to rewrite one of five experiments because it is a hit, that is a _great success_, not a failure.

But only in theory. In practice you would never get the time to rewrite what “already works”. And objectively, even with the best intentions, every rewrite comes with its own kinds of risks.

Perhaps not at the kind of shop that deserves to go out of business. I do this literally every day from function snippets to entire systems.

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