Throwaway code and coding agents: Build it, ship it, move on

We as developers have a bias towards quality of code, even when it comes to throwaway code that we write to analyze some data or visualize results.

We spend too much time polishing things that don't need polishing.

Another thing is that coding agents are very good at writing throwaway code. We can use that skill.

We get fixated on evaluating coding agents on the ability to write perfect code, but we tend to forget the places where we can use them for what they are good at.

There was or is a time in every dev's life when we wished for a tool to solve one specific problem. Now it is easy to build that tool.

So we should just build it, ship it, and stop hand-polishing the parts that don't matter.