Comment by fooker

I disagree, most code is not worth improving.

I would rather make N bad prototypes to understand the feasibility of solving N problems than trying to write beautiful code for one misguided problem which may turn out to be a dead end.

There are a few orders of magnitude more problems worth solving than you can write good code for. Your time is your most important resource, writing needlessly robust code, checking for situations that your prototype will never encounter, just wastes time when it gets thrown away.

A good analogy for this is how we built bridges in the Roman empire, versus how we do it now.