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1. kstrau+(OP)[view] [source] 2026-02-05 02:33:55
OTOH, I was hired by an enterprise that was many months into a giant backend rewrite. After wrapping my head around the many plans, I realized they were rewriting Django, badly. One weekend I prototyped the whole thing… in Django. It worked. It met the specs. It was a CRUD app with a REST API.

I came in to work Monday morning, showed it off, and inadvertently triggered a firestorm. Later my boss told me not to do that again because it caused havoc with schedules and such.

So I quit and found a better job. Sometimes the new guy can make a better version themselves over the weekend, not because they’re a supergenius, but because they’re not hampered by 47 teams all trying to get their stamp on the project.

(In before “prime example of overconfidence!”: feel free to doubt. It was a CRUD app with a handful of models on a PostgreSQL backend. They were writing a new Python web framework to serve it, complete with their own ORM and forms library and validation library. Not because the existing ones wouldn’t work, mind you, but more out of not realizing that all these problems were already sufficiently solved for their requirements.)

replies(5): >>noduer+P >>majorm+V4 >>Novemb+o7 >>clarkm+48 >>neya+5h
2. noduer+P[view] [source] 2026-02-05 02:40:09
>>kstrau+(OP)
Take this idea and bring your own validation library and forms and UI components to the next job, and you've described what I do. And then you have real lock-in.
replies(1): >>kstrau+21
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3. kstrau+21[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-02-05 02:42:14
>>noduer+P
Ah, so you’re the one who made that same company’s marketing website!
4. majorm+V4[view] [source] 2026-02-05 03:17:13
>>kstrau+(OP)
Yeah, that definitely happens.

But I don't think Claude Code is going to prevent an org that thinks they can prompt their way to a replacement for all their SaaS from having internal political bickering that makes them end up with a extra-shitty mega-compromise to try to make all the internal stakeholders happy.

If you've got no vision and no taste, you need to find a vendor who will protect you from screwing up your internal processes and tools.

Internal tools teams have rarely cared much about UX or the day-to-day experience of their poor users. The quick-and-dirty internal-prompt-based one is likely to similarly be unimaginative and unintuitive.

5. Novemb+o7[view] [source] 2026-02-05 03:37:41
>>kstrau+(OP)
> Later my boss told me not to do that again because it caused havoc with schedules and such.

Did you talk to anyone about your plans before you brought in the demo or let them know they were solved problems? Often these sorts of reactions come down to your boss not wanting their team to lose their jobs because of the perception that it can all be handled by one person who's happy to work weekends.

replies(1): >>kstrau+09
6. clarkm+48[view] [source] 2026-02-05 03:43:33
>>kstrau+(OP)
Rule #1 of power: never outshine the master
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7. kstrau+09[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-02-05 03:53:52
>>Novemb+o7
I wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that. Honestly, I don’t want to be. The reality was that the project really could have been done in a month by a couple of people. It got turned into an enterprise project with multiple unaligned teams with Gantt charts and milestones and everything.

Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, for a Django CRUD app. It was a 4 person-week project turned into a major ordeal. No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things they could’ve been doing instead.

8. neya+5h[view] [source] 2026-02-05 05:22:56
>>kstrau+(OP)
I can relate to this so much. When I was a newly joined Google consultant at a partner firm, we went to their office - some 13 different types of cuisines, different types of game rooms, lounges and what not. A luxury star hotel experience. We were waiting for our meeting on behalf of this one particularly large media client who was bleeding money on Wordpress.

3 engineers arrived - fashionably late. We explained them the situation and all we wanted from them was some GCP offering that would cure our woes and one that would cut our bills. The senior consultant - and presumably the only tech guy (rest seemed to be salesy) wasted our time like a used car salesman - he didn't even understand Google's own product portfolio and recommended us to use something like Spanner - which was totally not the solution to the problem, not to mention, expensive.

My boss and I left the meeting pissed off and he told me - "Neya, you probably know more about the product portfolio than these guys. Let's leave". That weekend, I went with my tried and trusted favorite Db - PostgreSQL - CloudSQL with a custom Elixir middleware based an old CMS I wrote a decade ago. After some trial and error, the solution worked flawlessly (and still does till date on auto-pilot). My client still has the lowest cost in the region - 1/3rd the cost of their competitors...7 years later. Back then, there was no vibe-coding, no AI, no auto-completion. Just pure thinking and experimentation.

All this just to say I agree that the new guy sometimes can make the best solutions to a problem and not always screw up. I always listen to new hires these days (now I'm a fractional / CTO) because you never know who could pull off that 1/3rd cost cutting framework move.

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