[meco]

>the goal of those systems tend to be to pre-emptively be ready for v-next and handle all of the requirements as cleanly as possible, and future requirements as cleanly as possible.

>He greatly prefers to start hacking on a solution quickly and get something building and then work in the nuance and ugly later, refactoring whole sections over time to get a better and better solution.

I think you've articulated a dimension of programming that I've increasingly been observing and discussing with other engineers.

Do you happen to know a name for (or any language to describe) this kind of spectrum of problem solving where one end tends to pre-emptively encompass as many edge cases and future versions as possible, while the other focuses solely on the most obvious use case initially, adding in each edge case in successive versions of a "working" product (where working is used very loosely (i.e. single pixel on a screen is a "working" initial version))?

I definitely fall into the latter category, and find it very frustrating to work with engineers who want to chat edge cases that are days, weeks, or even months away from being relevant in my eyes. I would like to understand their thinking and this space of meta-problem solving better, but I'm not really sure what to call what we're talking about.