22. Do Not Use Prototype Code In Production
A prototype is meant to explore ideas, not to ship them. Why prototype code doesn't belong in production—and why rebuilding properly is often faster.
This tile is mainly for project managers — because for most developers, this is immediately clear.
Sometimes you want to try something out before building a new feature. So you quickly hack together a prototype to see if and how it could work. And sometimes… it works surprisingly well.
That's where the temptation starts — especially for project managers:
"It looks great already, why don't we just use this version in production?" 🚫 Don't!
It's rarely a good idea.
A prototype isn't built for performance, robustness, or stability. It's a quick experiment — no edge cases, no scalability, no proper architecture. It might seem to work fine in a small, safe test environment, but that says nothing about how it behaves with real users and real data.
A prototype is meant to explore ideas — not to ship them.
When you're ready to build the real feature, start fresh. Use the prototype as inspiration, not as foundation. In fact, rebuilding it properly is often faster than trying to polish a prototype into production quality code.
And if you often struggle to turn prototypes into production-ready features — I can help.
Let's connect.
