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That's not what being a professional means at all.

You adjust your approach depending on the stakes. That shouldn't be a controversial take.

You're using "cutting corners" as a pejorative, but ultimately if the stakes are low, you may -- perfectly reasonably -- decide to allocate less time/resources to particular activities, and more to others. You can call that "cutting corners", and you'd be right, but there's nothing necessarily wrong about that: it depends on the circumstances. And there's certainly nothing "unprofessional" about it.

For the mostly-vibe-coded script to reencode a bunch of my own video files to save disk space, I skimmed the result to make sure that it wasn't going to overwrite or delete anything it shouldn't. Cutting corners? Absolutely. Perfectly fine and sufficient? Absolutely.

For the software that I write that I intend to distribute to others, that could cause data loss or other unpleasant problems for them if I get it wrong, I write the code myself, I understand how it works, and I might write tests and/or get someone else to review it, depending on my own judgment of what needs to be done.

Recognizing the difference between the the situations in the prior two paragraphs is what it means to be a professional.

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>You adjust your approach depending on the stakes. That shouldn't be a controversial take.

At no time have I suggested that one cannot adjust one's approach. That's a straw man you invented.

I'm refuting the point that business considerations should always trump engineering considerations because profit.


Sure, but in this case, the engineering consideration was whether a specific plugin should be added to the list of other suggested plugins. It was literally just a business decision of whether to configure it to be one of the featured options users might want to install.



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