If you could write a spike well enough to wrap tests around it later and stabilize it into production code, why would you throw it away? If spiking became easier as a result of not throwing it away, would you do it more?
Is this at all related to what Martin Fowler said about sacrificial-architecture?
talked about how React scales well, meaning that there's never a point when the proof-of-concept needed to be fundamentally changed to become the real thing.
They used to do TDD but found it to be "too slow, foreign, and dogmatic". Instead, now they are just "ready for bugs"
"Alarms on everything"
"Pipe them to email, chat, and SMS"
"Bug fixes are a top priority"
"Tests are fine, but not compulsory"