On a lathe, the first pass is called the rough cut. It is fast and it is not pretty. Its only job is to take off most of the material and show you the shape of the part, so that every pass after it is smaller and more careful.
We work the same way. Two weeks after the inspection, there is a real version of the product, deployed, on real data, that you can click. It is missing a lot. That is fine. It exists to answer the scariest question while the answer is still cheap.
What the rough cut is for
Every project has one assumption that would sink it if it turned out to be wrong. Users will not trust the AI's answers. The bank feeds are too slow. The gesture feels wrong on older phones. The rough cut goes straight at that assumption.
If the assumption holds, we have a foundation and a direction. If it does not, we have lost two weeks instead of four months, and we change course together with the evidence in front of us.
It exists to answer the scariest question while the answer is still cheap.
What it is not
It is not a prototype that gets thrown away, and it is not a demo built on fake data. The rough cut is the first pass of the real thing. The code is production code, the deploy is a real deploy, and every pass after it builds on top.
That is why we can promise a demo every Friday after it. The shape is already there. From then on, we are just turning.
— The Lathly shop