Satire
We'll Clean It Up Later
Later is a place on the map that no engineering team has ever reached.
The code goes in. It's not pretty. Everyone knows it's not pretty.
Someone says: "We'll clean it up later."
The team nods. The PR is approved. The code ships.
What Actually Happens
Later never comes. The cleanup is added to the backlog. The backlog has 340 items. The cleanup ticket is prioritised as Medium. Medium tickets are reviewed quarterly. By Q3, a new feature is built on top of the ugly code. Now cleaning it up would require touching the new feature. The new feature is in production. No one wants to touch it.
The ugly code is now load-bearing.
“I've designed a microservices architecture to handle the cleanup. It has 14 services. It will also need cleaning up later.”
DivineForge Advisory
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Let's talk architecture →How a Builder Should Respond
You name the debt at the moment it's created. You write it into the PR description — what was cut, why, and what the future cost is. You get verbal acknowledgement from the team lead before merging. If the debt is structural, you attach a time estimate to it and propose a specific sprint to address it. Unnamed debt compounds. Named debt gets a plan.
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