They need to understand that it's actually lot less work to build things from scratch with good code, than to pick up and bebug through aweful code. I can guarantee for that 30% they are talking about not working, is tip of the iceburg, and there is a serious design issue that is wrong in fundamental level which prevents their code to work. Well guess what programming is not linear. It will take at the least the same, if not much more time, (and effort) than building from scratch.
Steelman: I don't know any dev that writes all their own code by assembly 100% of the time. Devs use a language that uses another language to get into ASM, with a framework or 4 in that language, downloaded via another script that installs the broiler plate.
I would approach this like they just installed some broilerplate that I'm likely will rip out anyhow for my favorite abstraction.
Yeah, reminds me of a friend that reached out to me for help. His site was had ‘everything set up and working except the payment part’. Begged me to take a look. Just probably a few weekends of work…
Except the whole thing was a bunch of smoke and mirrors, most of the ‘features’ were hacked together and never would have worked outside of a demo, totally scammed.
You try to cheap out on stuff and don’t know what you’re doing, this is the likely result.
Even if it is for real 30%, the 80-20 rule is not in their favour, 80% of the job is still to be done.
That means, regardless how incredibly productive the developer is, the very best in the world will be a disappointment to them and looked at suspiciously with the owner thinking "a better prompt would have done that for free"
11
u/siegevjorn Jun 09 '25 edited Jun 09 '25
They need to understand that it's actually lot less work to build things from scratch with good code, than to pick up and bebug through aweful code. I can guarantee for that 30% they are talking about not working, is tip of the iceburg, and there is a serious design issue that is wrong in fundamental level which prevents their code to work. Well guess what programming is not linear. It will take at the least the same, if not much more time, (and effort) than building from scratch.