I’m not 100% sure what to make of this, but I definitely thought it was interesting.

“Technical debt becomes a wise investment”

https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2025/12/this-is-a-time-of-technical-deflation/

This is a Time of Technical Deflation – Dan Shapiro's Blog

@mattiem Who cares if the code is full of bugs, performance issues, and security holes? It only has to work well enough to please the investors, and once your “innovation” is acquired by BigCo it becomes someone else’s problem
@slava see now you’re thinking!
@mattiem I’m skeptical of these takes that say programmers should stop caring about a core part of their job. When products fail due to “perfectionism” it is usually meddling and unclear direction from the top—and not because engineers were like “oh we should try to understand all the code we’re checking in and pause feature work once in a while to refactor duplication somewhat”. It’s just such a basic opinion to hold but they pass it off as savvy senior engineer thinking
@slava I’m not disagreeing with you *at all*. However I also think these phenomena are going to accelerate. And I’m trying to process what that means.
@mattiem we’ve collectively made it much faster and cheaper to churn out low-to-medium quality mostly-repetitive code. For parts of the industry that made their money doing this, the cost of production just dropped by an order of magnitude and it’s going to be disruptive. Everywhere else, we need to figure out how to wrangle lots of cheap-to-produce code. Some of that is in ensuring that code is actually fit for production. Some of it is coping with the gap in effort between producing a plausible prototype and producing production-quality code just got a whole lot bigger, so it is likely to get (even) harder to justify the cost of doing it right.
@dgregor79 @mattiem what's the difference between production-grade code and non-production-grade?
imo production has all sorts of constraints that incentivize speed over quality, including that of defining + validating requirements