One of the strangest things happening in startup tech today is that some companies are accumulating "legacy code" before they even have users at scale.
Think about it.
The product is six months old.
The team is five people.
The codebase already feels impossible to maintain.
Why?
Not because growth created complexity.
Not because millions of users pushed the architecture to its limits.
But because speed became the only goal.
We've all seen it:
• Features built with no tests
• Business logic duplicated across multiple files
• Documentation that exists only in someone's memory
• Quick fixes layered on top of quick fixes
• Developers afraid to touch certain parts of the codebase
The irony is that many startups are trying to move fast, but the shortcuts taken during the MVP stage end up slowing them down far earlier than expected.
Some founders argue that technical debt is a necessary tradeoff for validation.
Others believe that even an MVP should have a minimum standard of engineering quality if the product is expected to survive beyond launch.
So here's the discussion:
At what point does "moving fast" become "building future problems"?
Have you ever joined a project that felt like legacy code on day one?
What was the biggest mistake that created the problem?
Curious to hear stories from founders, developers, and product teams.
