Nah. I think a prototype is something you definitionally should throw away. There's a huge freedom to knowing that instead of taking on tech debt, you're commit

Nah. I think a prototype is something you definitionally should throw away. There's a huge freedom to knowing that instead of taking on tech debt, you're committed to declaring tech bankruptcy and throwing away the code. It lets you try things, cut corners, and generally experiment. It's great for thinking through what everybody really wants. I do agree that it's generally a bad idea to just throw out a long-lived code base. But for me that's not an estimation issue. It's because the urge to throw it out is usually a response to upstream problems that haven't gotten fixed. For example, a lot of code bases are a mess due to time pressure. But if you don't fix the process problems that turn time pressure into mess, then you're just doing to end up with another mess. Possibly a bigger one, in that stopping all productive output in favor of a rewrite usually makes business stakeholders crazy, causing increased time pressure.