Title: Hey Hacker News! I was recently involved in a startup where the CEO had made a crazy complex app with prisma - it did loads of things but it was a mad balancing act of insecurity, bugs, badly mangled code and database design that left a lot to be desired. I think my problem is they were just copying something that already exists rather than making something new that needs extreme user testing for it to become a thing. Obviously on such a codebase the CEO could get things done pretty fast but I couldn’t help feel it was completely hopeless for anyone else trying to make the project work correctly. Of course even with all this brittle code there were no tests.<p>My question first is<p>a) has Hacker News&#x2F;YC ever seen a startup fail because the codebase is so bad.<p>b) what is the best calculation to make when trading off code quality vs features?<p>c) do most YC startups write tests and try to write cleanish code in V1 or does none of this matter?<p>Should we just be chucking shit at the wall and seeing what sticks? Do most startups bin v1 and jump straight to v2 once they have traction?
Upvote: