6 ms·

Throwing away 18 months of code and starting over

65 points by tomaspiaggio12 7mo ago

maplant 7mo ago
Having a culture of not ever writing tests and actively disallowing them is so insane I can't even imagine why there's anything else in this post
- oraphalous 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - maplant 7mo ago
    Did I say that my way was the right way? No: what I said was actively disallowing tests in every situation was the wrong way. There is no ability here for the cost benefit analysis to change over time. There is only no tests
    - oraphalous 7mo ago
      Did you edit the wording of your original comment slightly to emphasise the "actively disallowing them" in every situation? Anyway... if that is what you meant, then ok. It's less awful a statement than what I felt I originally read. I'd still push back on your hyperbole though. I don't think the author was insane - and we don't know what the broader business context was when they started growing the team and decided to persist without building out the test architecture at that point. They made a call that dogfooding was going to be enough to catch issues as they grew the team. There are a lot of scenarios where that is going to be true. One scenario where it wouldn't - the most likely - is that the team isn't actually dogfooding because they personally don't find the product useful. Leadership lambasts them to use the product more... but no one does cause it sucks so much it impacts their own personal productivity. Even there I wouldn't use the word insane... just poor leadership.
      - maplant 7mo ago
        > Did you edit the wording of your original comment slightly to emphasise the "actively disallowing them" in every situation? I did not.
      - ChrisClark 7mo ago
        He did not edit, and you're misunderstanding the meaning behind his post. Not everything needs to be pedantic and accurate, language is flexible, this is about communicating, not being right. What we really don't need is paragraphs of someone arguing because their own definitions differ slightly from the OP
        oraphalous 7mo ago
        >He did not edit He edited his reply to me multiple times... which is what made me suspect an edit to the original comment. But whatever, I'm happy to acknowledge his original intent even if he did state it more harshly. >What we really don't need is paragraphs of someone arguing because their own definitions differ slightly from the OP This is unnecessary. OP came out with "AUTHOR IS INSANE" even on the most generous of interpretations. Even if we allow for nuance OP is claiming, there is little constructive about his contribution. I feel fine about calling it out.
        maplant 7mo ago
        > He edited his reply to me multiple times... I got the sense from your reply that some extra clarity would be beneficial. > This is unnecessary. OP came out with "AUTHOR IS INSANE" even on the most generous of interpretations. I did not actually call the author insane, I called their decision to explicitly disallow testing insane. It's an insane decision. I am not _literally_ calling the author insane.
        oraphalous 7mo ago
        > I did not actually call the author insane... If you think this distinction really matters wrt the point I'm trying to make, then it's time for you and I to bug out conversationally. Sometimes two individuals have such different ways of communicating that the pain of exegesis isn't worth the squeeze. No hard feelings. I'm sure 50% responsibility is at least mine, but it's not going to be worth it for either of us figuring out exactly what.
  - sodapopcan 7mo ago
    The truth is in the middle somewhere, regarding tests at least (yes, your microservices story is insane). I think the author could have been happier with the no-test decision if they had treated the initial work as a prototype with the idea of throwing it away. At the same time, writing some tests, should not be seen as a waste of time since if you're even at all experienced with it, it's going to be faster than constantly reloading your browser or pressing up-up-up-up-up in a REPL to check progress (if you're doing the latter you are essentially doing a form of sorta reverse TDD). So I dunno... I may be more in line with the idea that's a bit insane to prevent people from writing tests BUT so many people are so bad at writing tests that ya, for a go-gettem start up it could be the right call. I certainly agree with your whole cost-benefit analysis paragraph.
  - UltraSane 7mo ago
    Not having ANY tests means tons of manual testing is needed every time you modify code, which will rapidly consume more time than writing the tests would.
    - Jtsummers 7mo ago
      The manual tests also stop being run, or get reduced to such an extreme that any value from them is going to be low. Testing only happy paths and maybe release specific tests. This is shockingly (to outsiders, not to anyone who's ever been in the industry) common in aerospace and defense systems. There were some aircraft I would not fly on for a few years until I knew our updates had rolled out. Now I'm not connected to that work anymore so I'm back to "ignorance is bliss" mode and try not to think about it.
  - soperj 7mo ago
    > they just stampede in with "THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY". And the discussion can't even be had. That's exactly what this person is railing against. They strictly forbid testing.
    - oraphalous 7mo ago
      Again - that's a business decision that needs to be made in the context of that business. The fact that testing was forbidden isn't in itself good or bad. It depends on that business context. THe post says nothing about how that decision was made, whether it was discussed, or if it was just his absolutist ideal he imposed without consideration of the broader cost-benefit. And I still feel the original comment doesn't give this point enough weight.
      - emil-lp 7mo ago
        Forbidding tests is not a business decision, it's a software engineering decision, and it's a remarkably poor one at that.
        oraphalous 7mo ago
        Hard disagree. It's both. Choosing one way or the other comes with potential risks and rewards to the business and it's up to business leadership to choose what risks they want to take. Your job as an engineer - if you are not part of leadership is to explain those risks / rewards, and then let them make the call.
        emil-lp 7mo ago
        Okay, yes, that's a hard disagree. I have an education and experience in software development. If a manager told me to make a product in an unsafe manner, I'd refuse, and if push came to shove, leave. Leave, both because I wouldn't be able to defend my work as a professional, but also because I wouldn't work under someone who would want to dictate the manner in which I do what I do.
  - hinkley 7mo ago
    > After we started hiring, it became a disaster. When it stopped being two people he still forbade tests. In this decade. That is fucking nuts. Fun fact: the guy I worked a 2 man project with and I had a rock solid build cycle, and when we got cancelled to put more wood behind fewer arrows, he and I built the entire CI pipeline. On cruisecontrol. And if you don’t know what that is, that is Stone Age CI. Literal sticks and rocks. Was I ahead of a very big curve? You bet your sweet bippy. But that was more than twenty years ago.
    - oraphalous 7mo ago
      Did anyone here actually look at the product they were actually building? It's an AI agent bug discovery product. Their whole culture is probably driven at a fundamental philosophical level about the problems of bug discovery. As he says: he wanted to rely on dogfooding - using their product as the way of spotting bugs. That may have been spectactular naivete but it's not insanity. The point I keep coming back to here that everyone is fighting me so hard on is that these blanket statements of: NO TESTS IS NUTS... absent of an understanding of the business context... is harmful.
      - hinkley 7mo ago
        What ends up happening is that your most fundamental features end up rotting because manual testing has biases. Chief among them is probably Recency Bias. It is in fact super easy to break a launch feature if it’s not gating any of the features you’re working on now. If you don’t automate those, yes, you’re nuts. One of the worst ones I ever encountered was learning that someone broke the entire help system three months prior, and nobody noticed. Because developers don’t use the help system. I convinced a team of very skeptical people that E2E testing the help docs was a higher priority than automating testing of the authentication because every developer used that eight times a day or more. In fact on a previous project with trunk based builds, both times I broke login someone came to tell me so before the build finished. Debugging is about doing cheap tests first to prune the problem space, and slower tests until you find the culprit. Testing often forgets that and will run expensive tests before fast ones. Particularly in the ice cream cone. In short, if you declare an epic done with zero automation, you’re a fucking idiot.
  - kerkeslager 7mo ago
    > If you are a two man startup, burning through runway and pre-product-market fit... then spending a lot of time on tests is questionable (although the cost-benefit now with AI is changing very fast). What's insane that people in 2026 still think tests slow you down. It takes me maybe 40 hours (1 week) of coding to start receiving ROI from writing tests in a greenfield project, and by 80 hours I'm pretty sure I've saved more time from bugs and improved design due to TDD than I've spent writing the tests. The ROI is even faster if I'm not the only developer on the project. If your flagship product takes less time to develop than 40 hours, then your product is extremely vulnerable to being copied by another company, so your entire software project is a bad business idea. So there really aren't many exceptions: either your project benefits from tests, or it's too easy a project to be a business. So frankly, it's your comment lacking in cost/benefit analysis.
- torben-friis 7mo ago
  And particularly the “no tests go faster”. I feel like we keep having to reestablish known facts every two years in this field.
  - hinkley 7mo ago
    I ran into some serious struggles when we got far enough into accepting most of the tenets of XP as standard practice that most jobs didn’t even debate half of them and then landed at places that still thought they were stupid. I’d taken for granted I wasn’t going to have to fight those fights and forgotten how to debate them. Because I Said So is not a great look.
- paulhebert 7mo ago
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- deleted 7mo ago
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andrewstuart 7mo ago
I wouldn’t admit to this level of frankly incompetence. Wildly swinging dogmatism on how to do software development that’s so wrong you have to throw it all away - then repeating this failure loop multiple times. Doesn’t inspire any confidence in the person I wouldn’t get them to lead a project. Why would you be so loud and proud about all this.
- randlet 7mo ago
  "bugs were appearing everywhere out of the blue. The codebase was a huge mess of nulls, undefined behaviour, bad error handling. It was so bad that we actually lost a client over this." Especially wild considering their product is literally an automated bug finder lol.
  - pavel_lishin 7mo ago
    It's not particularly clear if that sentence refers to one of their previous, pre-current-pivot, products.
- monsieurbanana 7mo ago
  I think there's a real possibility this is a "no such thing as bad publicity" stunt.
- stephantul 7mo ago
  Same. Admitting to it is one thing, but still it takes a certain kind of attitude to outright forbid people to write tests.
- ordu 7mo ago
  > I wouldn’t admit to this level of frankly incompetence. Well yeah. It reminds me of how I wrote an addon for WoW, while having no clue how to write GUI code, learning lua and Blizzard API as I go, and having no tools except a text editor. It took 3-4 sharp ideological shifts, till I got to reading about elm architecture, and refactored all the code into it, while using addons helping with debugging issues, using a scaffold to create throw away addons for testing details of how WoW API functions/object work, using Ace library for messages and some other things, using my another addon to track events to learn when and which events WoW fires... Near the end I was a pretty competent addon developer, but the most part of my way there I was just trying a lot of things to see what works. > Why would you be so loud and proud about all this. Oh, I also like to tell my story of how it was. When I finally got it work on clean elm architecture with clear separation of state, view and update, I was proud, obviously, but even before that I was proud because of Danning-Kruger. My code was a way better than the original addon, and it was becoming better and better with each sharp turn. It is funny in hindsight.
ramesh31 7mo ago
Next is such a dumpster fire. So much wasted effort due to the Node ecosystem never developing a universal batteries included framework like Rails or Django.
- abraxas 7mo ago
  Which in turn were only invented because millennials would not be caught dead writing Java and JSP. We had all this shit figured out by the late nineties and 90% of what is accomplished on the web today was entirely possible and well integrated in Java app servers. This whole business is a fashion industry. I'm for one grateful for LLMs because for the first time in around 30 years there is actually genuine novelty to explore in software engineering. Ruby and nodejs weren't it.
  - sgarman 7mo ago
    Mongodb is webscale.
    - steve_adams_86 7mo ago
      Do you think it can handle 10 requests per hour? How many mongo instances will that require, and should I use micro services?
  - mattmanser 7mo ago
    It really wasn't. MVC really changed web dev for the better, and Django/Rails trail-blazed it. It's one of the few paradigms I've seen in my career that was an unequivocal win for us.
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      We were already doing MVC in products like the one sold by Altitude Software in Portugal, in a Tcl based platform that was inspired on Vignette and AOLServer. The authors of said product eventually went on to create OutSystems, one of the very few RAD products to do Delphi/VB like application servers with graphical tooling. It was no need for Django/Rails trail-blaze anything other than not everyone has Silicon Valey visibilty to push their ideas.
deleted 7mo ago
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fabiensanglard 7mo ago
Pearls. > I would NOT allow people to write tests > now [...] we started with tests from the ground up
- Trufa 7mo ago
  Two different stages of the project, not necessarily contradictory. I'm not saying this is great, but tests make a whole lot more sense when you know what you're building.
  - sodapopcan 7mo ago
    Yes. TFA author could have gone into it with this mindset and treated the initial work as a prototype with the idea of throwing it away and would have been happier about it. > but tests make a whole lot more sense when you know what you're building. It's very true. This is a "gotcha" a lot of anti-TDDers always bring up, and yet some talk about "prototyping == good" without ever making the connection that you can do both.
  - wagwang 7mo ago
    in an age of generated tests, a mandate on no tests is just dumb
  - casey2 7mo ago
    Two different extremes of dumbassery. If you can't program without the simplest dogma guiding you then programming isn't for you. If you don't even know what you're building why are you selling it as a product?! What are you doing in those 18 months that you don't understand anything about the thing you are building. It should be common sense to add common sense tests to critical components. Now they are doing TDD THEY STILL DON'T KNOW THE CRITICAL COMPONENTS. Nothing changed. They lack systems thinking. My guess is that both are just vibecoded slop.
renewiltord 7mo ago
Tests are most useful for regression detection, so it's a good instinct to not add them when you're primarily exploring. Once you've decided to switch to exploitation, though, regression will hurt. I think it's just a classic 0 to 0.1 not being the same thing as 0.1 to 1.
ralferoo 7mo ago
It's not really hinted at in the article, which doesn't actually mention whether the rewrite was a net gain - I presume it was or they wouldn't have written the article, and the lead-in picture paints a rosy picture, but the tone at the end suggests he's not happy with how things turned out. But one thing that used to be a common design anti-pattern was the "version 2 problem". I think I first heard about it when Netscape were talking about how NN2 was a disaster, and they were finally happy with NN3 or NN4. Often version 1 is a hastily thrown together mess of stuff, but it works and people like it. But there's lots of bad design decisions and you reach a limit with how far you can continue pushing that bad design before it gets too brittle to change. So you start on version 2, a complete rewrite to fix all the problems and you end up with something that's "technically perfect" but so overengineered, it's slow and everybody hates it, plus there are probably lots of workflow hoops to jump through to get things approved that you end up not making any progress, and possibly version 2 kills the product and/or the company. The idea is that the "version 3" is a pragmatic compromise - the worse design problems from version 1 are gone, but you forego all the unnecessary stuff that you added in version 2, and finally have a product that customers like again (assuming you can convince them to come back and try v3 out) and you can build into future versions. To a large degree I think this "version 2 problem" was a by product of waterfall design, it's certainly been less common since agile development became popular in the early 2000s and tooling made large scale refactoring easier, but even so I remember working somewhere with a v1 that the customers were using and a v2 that was a 3-year rewrite going on in parallel. None of the developers wanted to work on v1 even though that's what brought in the revenue, and v2 didn't have any of the benefit of the bug fixes accumulated over the years to fix very specific issues that were never captured in any of the scope documents.
- pjmorris 7mo ago
  "The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile." - Fred Brooks, 'The Mythical Man Month' (1975)
  - ralferoo 7mo ago
heliumtera 7mo ago
So you started with 2023 theo.gg philosophy but now moved on to 2026 theo.gg philosophy
deleted 7mo ago
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4rtem 7mo ago
Nice using of the io domain there
notorandit 7mo ago
It's a big move. But I understand it. Sometimes your code is "just" a proof of concept, a way to test the idea. Very far from a decent product. That is the time you ditch the code, keep the ideas (both good and bad) and start over.
- qingcharles 7mo ago
  This. Depending on the project, especially if you're doing something really novel, you can end up going down dozens of dead-ends which, when removed, leave little scars all over the code base. It can be so refreshing making that decision to open the old code on one screen and a fresh project on the other and do it right from the start.
  - notorandit 7mo ago
    Indeed.
dagi3d 7mo ago
sorry, still don't get no tests as an excuse to go faster. obviously ymmv, but you will need to test your implementation somehow, and manual testing usually takes more time than running your automated tests. no need to over test, but definitely tests doesn't mean it will slow you down, unless you don't know how to test, which in that case, that's totally up to you.
simonw 7mo ago
"For the longest time, I would NOT allow people to write tests because I thought that culturally, we need to have a culture of shipping fast" Tests are how you ship fast. If you have good tests in place you can ship a new feature without fear that it will break some other feature that you haven't manually tested yet.
- Hamuko 7mo ago
  I think the more specific description would be that "not writing tests allows shipping fast today, writing tests allows shipping fast tomorrow and afterwards". It wasn't too long ago that I wrote tests for something that was shipped years ago without any automated tests. Figured it was easier doing that than hoping we won't break it.
  - simonw 7mo ago
    Yeah, but in my experience it really is a literal today vs tomorrow thing. Your tests pay for themselves the moment you want to ship a second feature without fear of breaking the first.
    - Ekaros 7mo ago
      If you are going to test what you develop might as well write any tests you do formally right away. It is unlikely you get it fully ready in one go, so you need to anyway run same tests again when you iterate it developing it today. And that is the minimum level to aim at. If you can automate anything you do to test it right now you should.
- ephou7 7mo ago
  Exactly. OP seems to have very limited understanding of software development if that fact has eluded him.
- pastescreenshot 7mo ago
  The rewrite version of this that has gone best for me is to do it as a strangler, not a reset. Pick one ugly workflow, lock in current behavior with characterization tests, rebuild that slice behind a flag, repeat. You still get to fix the architecture, but you do not throw away years of weird production knowledge.
rex_claw 7mo ago
[dead]
elAhmo 7mo ago
I can't imagine working as a developer at a place where manager/founder "does NOT allow" tests to be written. This, combined with four pivots mentioned in the article seems like they are just riding the hype and trying to brute-force a product without having any basics or PMF.
- nineteen999 7mo ago
  How companies like this get funding is well beyond me.
Jtsummers 7mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317568 - A submission by this person's company where they say they'll refund you if a bug makes it past their system. Given how buggy their own system apparently is (to the point they're scrapping all the code), perhaps it's not such a smart offer on their part.
aaronrobinson 7mo ago
You sound like an absolute nightmare to work for.
tecoholic 7mo ago
Who are you people? 4 pivots and still going with "no tests" -> "tests first" rewrites. I mean, people say tech jobs are on down trend, projects are drying. And then there is this. I just can't make sense.
- UncleEntity 7mo ago
  Pivot to where the stupid money is being thrown around seems like a perfectly reasonable business plan.
mpalmer 7mo ago
Side note, can we have far, far fewer of the cartoon "infographics" that are just Bad Concepts On Left, Good Concepts On Right?
anacrolix 7mo ago
I know I'm getting old, but who let juniors vibe code a company. And why can you not use AI to refactor it to sanity. Rewriting when you get it that bad the first time around will not work.

Having a culture of not ever writing tests and actively disallowing them is so insane I can't even imagine why there's anything else in this post

oraphalous 7mo ago
[flagged]
- maplant 7mo ago
  Did I say that my way was the right way? No: what I said was actively disallowing tests in every situation was the wrong way. There is no ability here for the cost benefit analysis to change over time. There is only no tests
  - oraphalous 7mo ago
    Did you edit the wording of your original comment slightly to emphasise the "actively disallowing them" in every situation? Anyway... if that is what you meant, then ok. It's less awful a statement than what I felt I originally read. I'd still push back on your hyperbole though. I don't think the author was insane - and we don't know what the broader business context was when they started growing the team and decided to persist without building out the test architecture at that point. They made a call that dogfooding was going to be enough to catch issues as they grew the team. There are a lot of scenarios where that is going to be true. One scenario where it wouldn't - the most likely - is that the team isn't actually dogfooding because they personally don't find the product useful. Leadership lambasts them to use the product more... but no one does cause it sucks so much it impacts their own personal productivity. Even there I wouldn't use the word insane... just poor leadership.
    - maplant 7mo ago
      > Did you edit the wording of your original comment slightly to emphasise the "actively disallowing them" in every situation? I did not.
    - ChrisClark 7mo ago
      He did not edit, and you're misunderstanding the meaning behind his post. Not everything needs to be pedantic and accurate, language is flexible, this is about communicating, not being right. What we really don't need is paragraphs of someone arguing because their own definitions differ slightly from the OP
      - oraphalous 7mo ago
        >He did not edit He edited his reply to me multiple times... which is what made me suspect an edit to the original comment. But whatever, I'm happy to acknowledge his original intent even if he did state it more harshly. >What we really don't need is paragraphs of someone arguing because their own definitions differ slightly from the OP This is unnecessary. OP came out with "AUTHOR IS INSANE" even on the most generous of interpretations. Even if we allow for nuance OP is claiming, there is little constructive about his contribution. I feel fine about calling it out.
        maplant 7mo ago
        > He edited his reply to me multiple times... I got the sense from your reply that some extra clarity would be beneficial. > This is unnecessary. OP came out with "AUTHOR IS INSANE" even on the most generous of interpretations. I did not actually call the author insane, I called their decision to explicitly disallow testing insane. It's an insane decision. I am not _literally_ calling the author insane.
        oraphalous 7mo ago
        > I did not actually call the author insane... If you think this distinction really matters wrt the point I'm trying to make, then it's time for you and I to bug out conversationally. Sometimes two individuals have such different ways of communicating that the pain of exegesis isn't worth the squeeze. No hard feelings. I'm sure 50% responsibility is at least mine, but it's not going to be worth it for either of us figuring out exactly what.
- sodapopcan 7mo ago
  The truth is in the middle somewhere, regarding tests at least (yes, your microservices story is insane). I think the author could have been happier with the no-test decision if they had treated the initial work as a prototype with the idea of throwing it away. At the same time, writing some tests, should not be seen as a waste of time since if you're even at all experienced with it, it's going to be faster than constantly reloading your browser or pressing up-up-up-up-up in a REPL to check progress (if you're doing the latter you are essentially doing a form of sorta reverse TDD). So I dunno... I may be more in line with the idea that's a bit insane to prevent people from writing tests BUT so many people are so bad at writing tests that ya, for a go-gettem start up it could be the right call. I certainly agree with your whole cost-benefit analysis paragraph.
- UltraSane 7mo ago
  Not having ANY tests means tons of manual testing is needed every time you modify code, which will rapidly consume more time than writing the tests would.
  - Jtsummers 7mo ago
    The manual tests also stop being run, or get reduced to such an extreme that any value from them is going to be low. Testing only happy paths and maybe release specific tests. This is shockingly (to outsiders, not to anyone who's ever been in the industry) common in aerospace and defense systems. There were some aircraft I would not fly on for a few years until I knew our updates had rolled out. Now I'm not connected to that work anymore so I'm back to "ignorance is bliss" mode and try not to think about it.
- soperj 7mo ago
  > they just stampede in with "THIS IS THE RIGHT WAY". And the discussion can't even be had. That's exactly what this person is railing against. They strictly forbid testing.
  - oraphalous 7mo ago
    Again - that's a business decision that needs to be made in the context of that business. The fact that testing was forbidden isn't in itself good or bad. It depends on that business context. THe post says nothing about how that decision was made, whether it was discussed, or if it was just his absolutist ideal he imposed without consideration of the broader cost-benefit. And I still feel the original comment doesn't give this point enough weight.
    - emil-lp 7mo ago
      Forbidding tests is not a business decision, it's a software engineering decision, and it's a remarkably poor one at that.
      - oraphalous 7mo ago
        Hard disagree. It's both. Choosing one way or the other comes with potential risks and rewards to the business and it's up to business leadership to choose what risks they want to take. Your job as an engineer - if you are not part of leadership is to explain those risks / rewards, and then let them make the call.
        emil-lp 7mo ago
        Okay, yes, that's a hard disagree. I have an education and experience in software development. If a manager told me to make a product in an unsafe manner, I'd refuse, and if push came to shove, leave. Leave, both because I wouldn't be able to defend my work as a professional, but also because I wouldn't work under someone who would want to dictate the manner in which I do what I do.
- hinkley 7mo ago
  > After we started hiring, it became a disaster. When it stopped being two people he still forbade tests. In this decade. That is fucking nuts. Fun fact: the guy I worked a 2 man project with and I had a rock solid build cycle, and when we got cancelled to put more wood behind fewer arrows, he and I built the entire CI pipeline. On cruisecontrol. And if you don’t know what that is, that is Stone Age CI. Literal sticks and rocks. Was I ahead of a very big curve? You bet your sweet bippy. But that was more than twenty years ago.
  - oraphalous 7mo ago
    Did anyone here actually look at the product they were actually building? It's an AI agent bug discovery product. Their whole culture is probably driven at a fundamental philosophical level about the problems of bug discovery. As he says: he wanted to rely on dogfooding - using their product as the way of spotting bugs. That may have been spectactular naivete but it's not insanity. The point I keep coming back to here that everyone is fighting me so hard on is that these blanket statements of: NO TESTS IS NUTS... absent of an understanding of the business context... is harmful.
    - hinkley 7mo ago
      What ends up happening is that your most fundamental features end up rotting because manual testing has biases. Chief among them is probably Recency Bias. It is in fact super easy to break a launch feature if it’s not gating any of the features you’re working on now. If you don’t automate those, yes, you’re nuts. One of the worst ones I ever encountered was learning that someone broke the entire help system three months prior, and nobody noticed. Because developers don’t use the help system. I convinced a team of very skeptical people that E2E testing the help docs was a higher priority than automating testing of the authentication because every developer used that eight times a day or more. In fact on a previous project with trunk based builds, both times I broke login someone came to tell me so before the build finished. Debugging is about doing cheap tests first to prune the problem space, and slower tests until you find the culprit. Testing often forgets that and will run expensive tests before fast ones. Particularly in the ice cream cone. In short, if you declare an epic done with zero automation, you’re a fucking idiot.
- kerkeslager 7mo ago
  > If you are a two man startup, burning through runway and pre-product-market fit... then spending a lot of time on tests is questionable (although the cost-benefit now with AI is changing very fast). What's insane that people in 2026 still think tests slow you down. It takes me maybe 40 hours (1 week) of coding to start receiving ROI from writing tests in a greenfield project, and by 80 hours I'm pretty sure I've saved more time from bugs and improved design due to TDD than I've spent writing the tests. The ROI is even faster if I'm not the only developer on the project. If your flagship product takes less time to develop than 40 hours, then your product is extremely vulnerable to being copied by another company, so your entire software project is a bad business idea. So there really aren't many exceptions: either your project benefits from tests, or it's too easy a project to be a business. So frankly, it's your comment lacking in cost/benefit analysis.
torben-friis 7mo ago
And particularly the “no tests go faster”. I feel like we keep having to reestablish known facts every two years in this field.
- hinkley 7mo ago
  I ran into some serious struggles when we got far enough into accepting most of the tenets of XP as standard practice that most jobs didn’t even debate half of them and then landed at places that still thought they were stupid. I’d taken for granted I wasn’t going to have to fight those fights and forgotten how to debate them. Because I Said So is not a great look.
paulhebert 7mo ago
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deleted 7mo ago
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andrewstuart 7mo ago

I wouldn’t admit to this level of frankly incompetence. Wildly swinging dogmatism on how to do software development that’s so wrong you have to throw it all away - then repeating this failure loop multiple times. Doesn’t inspire any confidence in the person I wouldn’t get them to lead a project. Why would you be so loud and proud about all this.

randlet 7mo ago
"bugs were appearing everywhere out of the blue. The codebase was a huge mess of nulls, undefined behaviour, bad error handling. It was so bad that we actually lost a client over this." Especially wild considering their product is literally an automated bug finder lol.
- pavel_lishin 7mo ago
  It's not particularly clear if that sentence refers to one of their previous, pre-current-pivot, products.
monsieurbanana 7mo ago
I think there's a real possibility this is a "no such thing as bad publicity" stunt.
stephantul 7mo ago
Same. Admitting to it is one thing, but still it takes a certain kind of attitude to outright forbid people to write tests.
ordu 7mo ago
> I wouldn’t admit to this level of frankly incompetence. Well yeah. It reminds me of how I wrote an addon for WoW, while having no clue how to write GUI code, learning lua and Blizzard API as I go, and having no tools except a text editor. It took 3-4 sharp ideological shifts, till I got to reading about elm architecture, and refactored all the code into it, while using addons helping with debugging issues, using a scaffold to create throw away addons for testing details of how WoW API functions/object work, using Ace library for messages and some other things, using my another addon to track events to learn when and which events WoW fires... Near the end I was a pretty competent addon developer, but the most part of my way there I was just trying a lot of things to see what works. > Why would you be so loud and proud about all this. Oh, I also like to tell my story of how it was. When I finally got it work on clean elm architecture with clear separation of state, view and update, I was proud, obviously, but even before that I was proud because of Danning-Kruger. My code was a way better than the original addon, and it was becoming better and better with each sharp turn. It is funny in hindsight.

ramesh31 7mo ago

Next is such a dumpster fire. So much wasted effort due to the Node ecosystem never developing a universal batteries included framework like Rails or Django.

abraxas 7mo ago
Which in turn were only invented because millennials would not be caught dead writing Java and JSP. We had all this shit figured out by the late nineties and 90% of what is accomplished on the web today was entirely possible and well integrated in Java app servers. This whole business is a fashion industry. I'm for one grateful for LLMs because for the first time in around 30 years there is actually genuine novelty to explore in software engineering. Ruby and nodejs weren't it.
- sgarman 7mo ago
  Mongodb is webscale.
  - steve_adams_86 7mo ago
    Do you think it can handle 10 requests per hour? How many mongo instances will that require, and should I use micro services?
- mattmanser 7mo ago
  It really wasn't. MVC really changed web dev for the better, and Django/Rails trail-blazed it. It's one of the few paradigms I've seen in my career that was an unequivocal win for us.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    We were already doing MVC in products like the one sold by Altitude Software in Portugal, in a Tcl based platform that was inspired on Vignette and AOLServer. The authors of said product eventually went on to create OutSystems, one of the very few RAD products to do Delphi/VB like application servers with graphical tooling. It was no need for Django/Rails trail-blaze anything other than not everyone has Silicon Valey visibilty to push their ideas.

deleted 7mo ago

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fabiensanglard 7mo ago

Pearls. > I would NOT allow people to write tests > now [...] we started with tests from the ground up

Trufa 7mo ago
Two different stages of the project, not necessarily contradictory. I'm not saying this is great, but tests make a whole lot more sense when you know what you're building.
- sodapopcan 7mo ago
  Yes. TFA author could have gone into it with this mindset and treated the initial work as a prototype with the idea of throwing it away and would have been happier about it. > but tests make a whole lot more sense when you know what you're building. It's very true. This is a "gotcha" a lot of anti-TDDers always bring up, and yet some talk about "prototyping == good" without ever making the connection that you can do both.
- wagwang 7mo ago
  in an age of generated tests, a mandate on no tests is just dumb
- casey2 7mo ago
  Two different extremes of dumbassery. If you can't program without the simplest dogma guiding you then programming isn't for you. If you don't even know what you're building why are you selling it as a product?! What are you doing in those 18 months that you don't understand anything about the thing you are building. It should be common sense to add common sense tests to critical components. Now they are doing TDD THEY STILL DON'T KNOW THE CRITICAL COMPONENTS. Nothing changed. They lack systems thinking. My guess is that both are just vibecoded slop.

renewiltord 7mo ago

Tests are most useful for regression detection, so it's a good instinct to not add them when you're primarily exploring. Once you've decided to switch to exploitation, though, regression will hurt. I think it's just a classic 0 to 0.1 not being the same thing as 0.1 to 1.

ralferoo 7mo ago

It's not really hinted at in the article, which doesn't actually mention whether the rewrite was a net gain - I presume it was or they wouldn't have written the article, and the lead-in picture paints a rosy picture, but the tone at the end suggests he's not happy with how things turned out. But one thing that used to be a common design anti-pattern was the "version 2 problem". I think I first heard about it when Netscape were talking about how NN2 was a disaster, and they were finally happy with NN3 or NN4. Often version 1 is a hastily thrown together mess of stuff, but it works and people like it. But there's lots of bad design decisions and you reach a limit with how far you can continue pushing that bad design before it gets too brittle to change. So you start on version 2, a complete rewrite to fix all the problems and you end up with something that's "technically perfect" but so overengineered, it's slow and everybody hates it, plus there are probably lots of workflow hoops to jump through to get things approved that you end up not making any progress, and possibly version 2 kills the product and/or the company. The idea is that the "version 3" is a pragmatic compromise - the worse design problems from version 1 are gone, but you forego all the unnecessary stuff that you added in version 2, and finally have a product that customers like again (assuming you can convince them to come back and try v3 out) and you can build into future versions. To a large degree I think this "version 2 problem" was a by product of waterfall design, it's certainly been less common since agile development became popular in the early 2000s and tooling made large scale refactoring easier, but even so I remember working somewhere with a v1 that the customers were using and a v2 that was a 3-year rewrite going on in parallel. None of the developers wanted to work on v1 even though that's what brought in the revenue, and v2 didn't have any of the benefit of the bug fixes accumulated over the years to fix very specific issues that were never captured in any of the scope documents.

pjmorris 7mo ago
"The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile." - Fred Brooks, 'The Mythical Man Month' (1975)
- ralferoo 7mo ago

heliumtera 7mo ago

So you started with 2023 theo.gg philosophy but now moved on to 2026 theo.gg philosophy

deleted 7mo ago

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4rtem 7mo ago

Nice using of the io domain there

notorandit 7mo ago

It's a big move. But I understand it. Sometimes your code is "just" a proof of concept, a way to test the idea. Very far from a decent product. That is the time you ditch the code, keep the ideas (both good and bad) and start over.

qingcharles 7mo ago
This. Depending on the project, especially if you're doing something really novel, you can end up going down dozens of dead-ends which, when removed, leave little scars all over the code base. It can be so refreshing making that decision to open the old code on one screen and a fresh project on the other and do it right from the start.
- notorandit 7mo ago
  Indeed.

dagi3d 7mo ago

sorry, still don't get no tests as an excuse to go faster. obviously ymmv, but you will need to test your implementation somehow, and manual testing usually takes more time than running your automated tests. no need to over test, but definitely tests doesn't mean it will slow you down, unless you don't know how to test, which in that case, that's totally up to you.

simonw 7mo ago

"For the longest time, I would NOT allow people to write tests because I thought that culturally, we need to have a culture of shipping fast" Tests are how you ship fast. If you have good tests in place you can ship a new feature without fear that it will break some other feature that you haven't manually tested yet.

Hamuko 7mo ago
I think the more specific description would be that "not writing tests allows shipping fast today, writing tests allows shipping fast tomorrow and afterwards". It wasn't too long ago that I wrote tests for something that was shipped years ago without any automated tests. Figured it was easier doing that than hoping we won't break it.
- simonw 7mo ago
  Yeah, but in my experience it really is a literal today vs tomorrow thing. Your tests pay for themselves the moment you want to ship a second feature without fear of breaking the first.
  - Ekaros 7mo ago
    If you are going to test what you develop might as well write any tests you do formally right away. It is unlikely you get it fully ready in one go, so you need to anyway run same tests again when you iterate it developing it today. And that is the minimum level to aim at. If you can automate anything you do to test it right now you should.
ephou7 7mo ago
Exactly. OP seems to have very limited understanding of software development if that fact has eluded him.
pastescreenshot 7mo ago
The rewrite version of this that has gone best for me is to do it as a strangler, not a reset. Pick one ugly workflow, lock in current behavior with characterization tests, rebuild that slice behind a flag, repeat. You still get to fix the architecture, but you do not throw away years of weird production knowledge.

rex_claw 7mo ago

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elAhmo 7mo ago

I can't imagine working as a developer at a place where manager/founder "does NOT allow" tests to be written. This, combined with four pivots mentioned in the article seems like they are just riding the hype and trying to brute-force a product without having any basics or PMF.

nineteen999 7mo ago
How companies like this get funding is well beyond me.

Jtsummers 7mo ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317568 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317568 - A submission by this person's company where they say they'll refund you if a bug makes it past their system. Given how buggy their own system apparently is (to the point they're scrapping all the code), perhaps it's not such a smart offer on their part.

aaronrobinson 7mo ago

You sound like an absolute nightmare to work for.

tecoholic 7mo ago

Who are you people? 4 pivots and still going with "no tests" -> "tests first" rewrites. I mean, people say tech jobs are on down trend, projects are drying. And then there is this. I just can't make sense.

UncleEntity 7mo ago
Pivot to where the stupid money is being thrown around seems like a perfectly reasonable business plan.

mpalmer 7mo ago

Side note, can we have far, far fewer of the cartoon "infographics" that are just Bad Concepts On Left, Good Concepts On Right?

anacrolix 7mo ago

I know I'm getting old, but who let juniors vibe code a company. And why can you not use AI to refactor it to sanity. Rewriting when you get it that bad the first time around will not work.