Your Prototype Has Escaped

TL;DR: If customers, employees, or revenue depend on your prototype, it stopped being a prototype whether you meant it to or not.

Prototypes are supposed to be temporary. Then someone starts using one every day, a customer asks for access, a workflow gets built around it, and suddenly the thing you hacked together over a weekend is carrying actual business weight. That does not mean you need to throw it away. It does mean the shortcuts that made sense during experimentation deserve another look. Once failure has consequences, your prototype has escaped into production.

Your Prototype Has Escaped
Technical Debt Advisors

Your Prototype Has Escaped

Answer six quick questions. We are not grading the code. We are checking whether real business consequences have arrived before production safeguards did.

Assessment result

Is it still a prototype?

Answer the six questions to see whether the consequences have changed.

What is pushing it toward production
  • Answer the questions to see the strongest signals.
The point is not to punish experimentation. It is to notice when the consequences have changed.
Want us to look at what escaped?
Prototype status
Waiting for answers
6 questions · 3 choices each
PrototypeBecoming productionEscaped
Copyright 2026 Yet Analytics.
Previous
Previous

How Much Spaghetti Is Too Much Spaghetti?

Next
Next

Nobody Knows What Dave Built