That's not what I meant at all. Instead of building lots of bells and whistles and "features" these days, I tend to build the minimum viable product. The last 1

That's not what I meant at all. Instead of building lots of bells and whistles and "features" these days, I tend to build the minimum viable product. The last 10% takes 90% of the effort, and I've found it's usually unnecessary/unused anyway. This frees me up to solve 3-4 problems where I once solved 1 (and 3-4 that nobody actually had). This is, of course, a gross generalization. Regarding your last sentence: We all "move on and leave others to deal with our mess" to some extent. It's unhealthy for a developer to set out to fix all the problems in a stack, and it's unrealistic to expect them to leave a tidy solution when they're done. Iterative, collaborative software development is like democracy: Messy and inefficient and frustrating, and also the only viable way to get things done.