I periodically think about this line I found on the C2 wiki:

"I believe it is time to explicitly state the long held secret of software, we do not need to do design; design is ineffective and costly." --Wayne Mack

It's really hard to argue with a money printing machine. That theoretically it might print faster or at least longer for a bigger integral, after doing things that seem to slow down printing now, is also hard to believe if the person you're arguing with has never experienced such a non-linear outcome.

That sounds like a line by someone who has never seen the disaster that some incompetent people can do. Design is not necessarily something done by a kind of mythical "architect" (whatever that means...); instead, a good programmer simply very often write software that has a good design.

And I would say than in most areas, design is effective and required.

NT works. 9x is long-dead (and even 9x had tons of design, but there was just a gap too immense on some fundamentals to get anywhere)

I would even make the hypothesis that good design is always eventually effective and required, but the period of time after which lack of proper design hits you badly varies, and in some fields it is actually longer than the lifetime of the product...

I've come to expect that code quality has a strong link to success but in sometimes its inversely proportional. What I mean, is that at the Seed/Series A timeframe, I doubt you will see a strong performing company, with a codebase with high quality. I also the odds are against seeing a tech company with billions in revenue (not worth) have a really poor codebase. I can think of plenty of examples where the desire to 'do it right', has cost a company their marketshare.

As much as Netscape vs Microsoft hurt Netscape, the time it took to do NS7 and the quality it shipped with, pushed them back 5-6 years.

Perhaps Extreme Go Horse has some wisdom behind it after all

Reference: https://medium.com/@dekaah/22-axioms-of-the-extreme-go-horse...