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Quick & Dirty

Term

A quick-and-dirty solution is a rough, sometimes inelegant or inadequate solution used to fix or paper over a problem quickly.

A quick-and-dirty solution is a rough, sometimes inelegant or inadequate solution used to fix or paper over a problem quickly. It is usually faster to implement than a clean solution, at the cost of technical debt.

Quick-and-dirty solutions are usually about working around a problem rather than solving its root cause. The approach is also used for prototyping or proof-of-concept validation (POC).

Anecdote: Microsoft's very first operating system, MS-DOS, was bought from Seattle Computer Products in 1981. Its original name was Q-DOS — for Quick and Dirty Operating System.

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