jargon

Architecture & practice·Making and recording decisions

you demoed the working prototype and someone asked when it could go live, which was never the plan.

Proof of concept

Also calledPOC, prototype

A deliberately incomplete build that shows an approach can work. It skips error handling, security, scale and edge cases on purpose, and its greatest danger is its own success — a convincing demo creates pressure to ship the thing that was never built to be shipped. Say what it omits at the same moment you show it, in the same sentence, every time.

Commonly confused with