> My experience has been that things built by two or three people, working as peers, are often much 'better' (meet the needs better, cover more cases, have a mo

> My experience has been that things built by two or three people, working as peers, are often much 'better' (meet the needs better, cover more cases, have a more consistent model) than things built by one person I concur, but for a different reason than you seem to imply (which seems to be "being conservative with changes and goal-oriented" -- nothing wrong with that on its own though). I noticed that my own coding improved dramatically after I started working with others. This is due to several things: (1) competition and trying to be better than others, (2) once you work with several people, you take extra time to document what you are doing, which occasionally leads to you rethinking how you should be doing what you are doing in the first place, (3) don't know about you, but I am personally far more prone to taking "shortcuts" when working on my own (no one to embarrass myself in front of), (4) last but not least, when working with others, you can learn directly from others.