Kludge partially coincident with workaround
A kludge or kluge () is a workaround or quick-and-dirty solution that is clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, difficult to extend and hard to maintain. This term is used in diverse fields such as computer science, aerospace engineering, Internet slang, evolutionary neuroscience, and government. It is similar in meaning to the naval term jury rig.kluge: /klooj/ [from the German 'klug', clever; poss. related to Polish & Russian 'klucz' (a key, a hint, a main point)]
n. A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software.
n. A clever programming trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an expedient, if not clear, manner. Often used to repair bugs. Often involves ad-hockery and verges on being a crock.
n. Something that works for the wrong reason.
vt. To insert a kluge into a program. "I've kluged this routine to get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better way."
[WPI] n. A feature that is implemented in a rude manner. 
This entry notes kluge, which is now often spelled kludge, "was the original spelling, reported around computers as far back as the mid-1950s and, at that time, used exclusively of hardware kluges".
Kluge "was common Navy slang in the World War II era for any piece of electronics that worked well on shore but consistently failed at sea". A summary of a 1947 article in the New York Folklore Quarterly states:Computer science
In modern computing terminology, a "kludge" (or often a "hack") is a solution to a problem, the performance of a task, or a system fix which is inefficient, inelegant ("hacky"), or even incomprehensible, but which somehow works. It is similar to a workaround, but quick and ugly. To "kludge around something" is to avoid a bug or difficulty by building a kludge, perhaps exploiting properties of the bug itself. A kludge is often used to modify a working system while avoiding fundamental changes, or to ensure backwards compatibility. Hack can also be used with a positive connotation, for a quick solution to a frustrating problem.A kludge is often used to fix an unanticipated problem in an earlier kludge; this is essentially a kind of cruft.
A solution might be a kludge if it fails in corner cases. An intimate knowledge of the problem domain and execution environment is typically required to build a corner-case kludge. More commonly, a kludge is a heuristic which was expected to work almost always, but ends up failing often.
A 1960s Soviet anecdote tells of a computer part which needed a slightly delayed signal to work. Rather than setting up a timing system, the kludge was to connect long coils of internal wires to slow the electrical signal.
Another type of kludge is the evasion of an unknown problem or bug in a computer program. Rather than continue to struggle to diagnose and fix the bug, the programmer may write additional code to compensate. For example, if a variable keeps ending up doubled, a kludge may be to add later code that divides by two rather than to search for the original incorrect computation.
In computer networking, use of NAT (Network Address Translation) (RFC 1918) or PAT (Port Address Translation) to cope with the shortage of IPv4 addresses is an example of a kludge.
In FidoNet terminology, kludge refers to a piece of control data embedded inside a message.The transcendent aspects of our human experience, the things that touch our emotional and cognitive core, were not given to us by a Great Engineer. These are not the latest design features of an impeccably crafted brain. Rather, at every turn, brain design has been a kludge, a workaround, a jumble, a pastiche. The things we hold highest in our human experience (love, memory, dreams, and a predisposition for religious thought) result from a particular agglomeration of ad hoc solutions that have been piled on through millions of years of evolution history. It's not that we have fundamentally human thoughts and feelings despite the kludgy design of the brain as molded by the twists and turns of evolutionary history. Rather, we have them precisely because of that history. 
The research psychologist Gary Marcus's book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind compares evolutionary kluges with engineering ones like manifold vacuum-powered windshield wipers – when you accelerated or drove uphill, "Your wipers slowed to a crawl, or even stopped working altogether."
partially overlapping with partially intersecting with partially sharing with partially matching with partially aligning with