> 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 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.

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?

I guess it's company culture? I had a job and we initially had quick solutions that went messy. We set a hard policy that every "quick and dirty" feature will have a follow up story that gets pulled into the following 1-2 sprints. Often it turned out that the feature didn't live up to expectations and we just disabled or deleted it, the other times we reviewed it and refactored it properly.

We were highly autonomous team though and hardly had cadence complains. But mostly because the all other departments were lagging. Except marketing, marketing always has "ideas".

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.

Regarding the viability of rewrites of successful PoCs: Does the current environment change the math? How difficult would it be to overcome the inertia/hesitation/perception of slow, painful projects that may no longer be so?

A mention of a “rewrite” triggered. Whoever does rewrites is effectively out of ideas on what to do next. This is an opportunity cost and the team/company chooses what is more important and the rewrite is never at the top. So even promising or expecting such a thing is silly.

IMO it is a bit arrogant to assume it is more important to engineer a better version of a thing rather than make money quicker and cut corners. In essence it is better to have a problem which is about how to scale a new product because it got traction rather than solve a problem how to sell more copies of already scalable thing.

After my first proof of concept went into production by surprise, I stopped building proof of concepts and started building MVPs.

That's not to say that my first pass that I show people is ready to go into production, but I build the PoC from the beginning with the idea that it _is_ going into production and make sure I have a plan to get to production with it while I am working on it.

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