And then your teammate then takes a week to build an API that's only compatible with your hacked out code you wrote in twenty minutes. Now you've wasted both your time and her time when both need to be re-written.
Yes, consider what has happened here carefully. Maybe she shouldn't be allowed to, and should consider that 20 minute code as not existing. (Because on day 1 of her week, she could have written it properly.) That does not make it technical debt of 1 day. It means it didn't actually exist.
Maybe this is really a variation of the sunk cost fallacy or something similar, where if something seems to exist in some form, then people can't get their minds around the fact htat only 20 minutes of it actually exists and the rest simply doesn't and needs to be written if they want it to.
EDIT: all these downvoters are wrong. You say "now you have both wasted time" but the 20 minutes wasn't debt. It was the cost of the call option. For example in the other poster's example where a salesperson sold some code that didn't exist, his non-programming version of it wasn't debt toward the final thing: it was the cost he paid for the call option of being able to sell the whole thing. Hopefully he sold the option under cost :) his payment on the option has nothing to do with it.
Maybe she shouldn't be allowed to, and should consider that 20 minute code as not existing. (Because on day 1 of her week, she could have written it properly.)
Completely agree with this, and I wish it was said more often.
Prototypes are a valuable tool for testing hypotheses, but you have to discard them when testing is no longer all you're doing.
That means the key to responsible use of prototypes is to make sure you remain able to discard them! This is why shipping the prototype is so dangerous - because now you're locked into either maintaining the prototype, or a rewrite followed by a tricky, risky live migration.
