Posted on Nov 27

Gambiarra is the real engineering superpower no one admits using

#programming #ai #software #webdev

A developer’s guide to duct-tape brilliance, accidental architecture, and why the messiest solutions often win in real life.

Gambiarra for devs

There’s a quiet truth in engineering that nobody wants to say out loud:
half the world runs on duct tape, copy–pasted StackOverflow code, and the absolute conviction that “we’ll clean this up later.”

Developers love posting diagrams on LinkedIn with ten clean boxes and perfect arrows, but if you opened the real repo, you’d find a folder named something like temp_fix_please_delete that has powered production longer than some team members have been employed.

That’s gambiarra.

In Brazil, it’s a cultural art not “being sloppy,” but creative survival under constraints. Using what you have. Bending the rules just enough. Building a car spoiler out of a cutting board and two screws because it gets the job done and looks kind of awesome.

The more time I spend in tech, the more I think developers worldwide have been secretly practicing gambiarra without knowing it. Whether you’re hacking together a Lambda trigger at the last second, duct-taping Terraform to avoid a full refactor, or turning a Bash script into a “temporary internal tool” (that somehow becomes your company’s most stable service), you’re living the same spirit.

Recently, that vibe has exploded again thanks to AI, indie tooling, and the rise of “quick-and-dirty-but-it-works” apps everywhere. People are building entire businesses out of:

An OpenAI function call
A Cloudflare Worker
A chain of automation flows that would make an SRE cry
And vibes. Mostly vibes.

This article is about why that happens, why it works, why we love it, and why it terrifies us.

Oh and to set the tone properly:

TL;DR

Gambiarra isn’t just a Brazilian hack it’s the backbone of modern engineering. We pretend everything is clean and scalable, but real-world software is full of clever improvisations. This piece breaks down the art, the danger, and the weird beauty of embracing structured chaos as a dev.

The myth of proper engineering

Every dev claims they want “proper engineering” the clean architecture diagram, the perfect CI pipeline, the immaculate test suite that would make Kent Beck shed a proud tear. And yet… if you’ve ever actually shipped anything under pressure, you know those ideals collapse faster than a junior dev’s first Kubernetes deployment.

Real talk: the gap between “how we say we build systems” and “how systems actually get built” is wide enough to host a LAN party.

We pretend microservices are elegant modular chess pieces, but most teams end up with something that looks like four unrelated Pokémon glued together with API Gateway. It’s the dream house vs. the actual apartment with that one flickering lamp you never fix because it only breaks when guests aren’t around.

Take the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Beautiful. Pristine. It reads like scripture. But open your real infrastructure:

One Lambda named final_real_fix
An EC2 instance nobody touches because “it hosts something important”
A VPC so tangled it should come with a Minimap

Even the open-source world isn’t immune. Remember the left-pad incident? A tiny package with barely any logic broke half the internet because we’re all (quietly) building on top of tiny hacks written by one tired dev at 1am. If perfection was real, npm wouldn’t shake like a Jenga tower every other month.

And I’ll be honest I once built a feature that was supposed to be a “quick 48-hour sprint,” but it turned into a patchwork tapestry of Python, duct tape, and shameless if-statements. It worked. It shipped. And nobody ever rewrote it because… well, it kept working.

So here’s the uncomfortable truth: clean code is aspirational; gambiarra is operational.

Why scrappy solutions win in real life

There’s a moment every developer hits usually mid-panic, mid-deadline, mid-“why is this API suddenly returning HTML?” where you realize the elegant approach isn’t going to save you. What will save you is something held together by determination, duct tape, and maybe a Bash script you’re slightly ashamed of.

In other words: gambiarra wins because it solves the problem right now.

Think about it. When your controller dies mid-match, you don’t write a detailed proposal on “improving gaming ergonomics.” You tape the thing back together and jump back in. Scrappy solutions don’t care about aesthetics they care about survival.

Real dev life works exactly the same way.

I’ve watched entire teams duct-tape Cloudflare Workers into acting like API gateways because spinning up a proper load-balancer was “on the roadmap.” I’ve seen a collection of random shell scripts slowly evolve into a company’s most important internal tool. And I once inherited a Docker Compose file that had grown so large it felt like reading an ancient scroll, the kind that curses you if you say its name out loud.

My personal favorite? At one job, I wrote a quick Python cron job to replace an expensive vendor SaaS… just “temporarily.”
You already know where this is going.
That cron job ran in production for an embarrassingly long time and outperformed the original tool. At some point, people forgot it was mine they just called it “the system.”

Scrappy solutions work because they reduce friction.
Less ceremony → more shipping.
More shipping → more feedback.
More feedback → actual usefulness.

And honestly, what’s better: a perfect architecture that exists only in your head, or something that actually solves the problem so users stop yelling?

The secret nobody admits: speed is a feature and gambiarra gives you speed in a way pristine engineering never can.

When gambiarra becomes a feature

There’s a magical moment in every developer’s life when a hack stops being a hack. It sneaks past the “temporary fix” label, survives a few refactors, earns a Slack emoji, and suddenly… congratulations, you’ve just shipped a feature.

This is the secret life cycle of gambiarra:

improvised → useful → beloved → permanent.

Modern software is full of these accidental heroes.
Think about the explosion of AI glue apps those tiny tools built with a single OpenAI function call, a janky webhook, and a prayer. They weren’t designed for scale. They weren’t meant to have users. But they solved something now, and users don’t care how elegant your architecture diagram looked in Figma.

Some of the biggest tools we use today started as little hacks:

Homebrew was literally a collection of Ruby scripts until people realized it basically ran their entire macOS dev workflow.
Early Vercel releases had so many clever shortcuts it felt like a speedrunning category for web deployments.
Half the bots inside modern dev teams began as “I was bored and wrote a quick script” projects.

I once wrote a janky internal bot that scraped logs, formatted alerts, and posted them into a chat channel with a little emoji rating system. Zero design. Zero planning. Zero dignity.
People LOVED it.
One PM literally said, “Why doesn’t every product have this?”
At some point leadership asked if we could “officially integrate the bot into our workflow,” and that was the moment I realized: oh no… the gambiarra is now a department tool.

It’s like modding a game and accidentally building a full DLC.
You start with “let me fix this one annoying thing,” and suddenly your creation has its own fanbase.

And honestly… if it works, solves a real pain, and people can’t imagine living without it is it still a hack?

The dark side nobody admits

Let’s be honest: gambiarra is fun right up until it isn’t.
It feels like a power-up… until you’re the one diffing three different “final_fix_v2_really_this_time.py” files at the worst possible moment. Every dev has lived through the moment where a clever shortcut mutates into a monster that demands tribute.

Scrappy solutions come with a shadow cost: tech debt that compounds like credit card interest.
You don’t feel it at first. The code runs. Users are happy. The team cheers your speed. But then someone touches the wrong line in a Terraform module, and suddenly logs go red and everyone is pretending they “remember how this was set up.”

I once watched a “quick fix” take down three services at once because the entire system quietly depended on a variable named something like dont_delete_this. The person who wrote it had already left the company, and the only documentation left behind was an outdated Confluence page and a comment that said “TODO: make this less cursed.”

Terraform, Kubernetes, serverless… pick any modern stack, and you’ll find haunted infrastructure.
Resources nobody owns.
Configs nobody understands.
A Helm chart that feels like reading someone’s diary.
The dark side of gambiarra isn’t that it fails it’s that when it fails, nobody remembers why it existed in the first place.

And debugging improvised engineering? Pure chaos.
You’re SSHing into an instance you didn’t know existed.
Someone says “why is this port open?”
Another dev mumbles “I think that’s for an old migration tool but I’m not 100% sure.”
Meanwhile your logs are screaming like a Dark Souls boss fight.

We love to celebrate speed… until the bill arrives.

Still, even with the nightmares, even knowing the future cleanup pain, we all keep doing it. Because deep down we know: sometimes the fastest way to ship is also the way that will come back to haunt you.

The future: structured chaos as a workflow

Here’s the wild twist: instead of pretending gambiarra doesn’t exist, modern tech is quietly building an entire ecosystem around it.
We’ve reached a point where improvisation isn’t a shameful secret it’s practically a feature on the roadmap.

Look around. The tools we use today aren’t designed for decade-long architectural purity. They’re designed for velocity, experimentation, and “just ship it and we’ll fix it when we have feelings again.”

Take n8n. It’s basically a playground for wiring random services together with all the structural integrity of a Jenga tower and that’s the point.
Or Supabase, which lets you spin up a full backend before your coffee cools.
Or serverless + edge functions, which let you deploy logic in places even you didn’t know existed.
Even OpenAI’s function calling is basically: “Hey, here’s a way to duct-tape intelligence into your app in ten minutes. Have fun.”

These tools don’t hide their flexibility; they weaponize it.

A friend recently told me, “I prototyped an entire product in a weekend with a mishmash of APIs, a Cloudflare Worker, and an LLM.” The crazy part? Users loved it.
The even crazier part? The MVP stayed in production for months because nobody wanted to break what was working.

AI copilots have only accelerated this chaos.
They make it easier to try weird things, generate glue code, and spin up ideas you would’ve never attempted manually. But they also make gambiarra easier to create… and harder to track.
We’re entering a new era where hacks don’t disappear they scale.

We’re heading toward a future of structured chaos: pipelines that acknowledge improvisation, architectures designed to evolve messily, and workflows that treat hacks as first-class citizens.

And honestly? It might be the most honest engineering culture we’ve ever had.

Conclusion the beauty in the mess

If you peel back every shiny interface, polished marketing page, or “enterprise-grade” architecture diagram, you’ll find the same thing underneath: humans improvising. Creative people trying stuff. Engineers making judgment calls under pressure and hoping the logs stay green long enough to celebrate.

That’s why gambiarra hits so hard it’s honest.
It’s the part of engineering that textbooks never admit exists, but every dev knows by heart. And maybe that’s the point: the industry worships clean code, but progress is usually made by people who ship before everything is perfect.

When I look back at the best things I’ve built the stuff people actually used, shared, or bragged about almost none of it started clean. It started with curiosity, constraint, and a willingness to bend the rules just enough to make something real. The polish always came later… if it came at all.

And maybe the controversial take is this: we don’t need less gambiarra.
We need a healthier relationship with it.

We should stop pretending everything is pristine under the hood and start celebrating the craft of creative problem-solving. Build fast, learn fast, and refactor when you come up for air. The future of development won’t be driven by perfect architecture it’ll be driven by teams who can navigate structured chaos without losing their minds.

So here’s my invitation:
Drop your best hack, your worst “temporary fix,” or the funniest duct-tape solution you’ve ever shipped in the comments. Let’s normalize the truth: we’re all building the plane mid-flight, and the miracle is that it stays in the air at all.