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I would worry that this would encourage more tech debt than I'm comfortable with. I already struggle with people shrugging off obviously predictable consequences of their thoughtlessness. I kind of expect people to at least attempt to think three months out. Who knows what we'll be doing in six but cmon.



Do you really look at code you wrote three months ago -- or any code you've just written -- and not see a lot of things you could improve? This isn't about not having foresight or failing to plan or not designing well.


Every time I am about to do a commit, I look at the code and give myself fifteen minutes to make it better. Always have (probably a habit I learned doing homework in college? I'm not quite sure).

In the grand scheme of things you'd hardly notice that it takes me a little bit longer. Over time those improvements become habituated and I just do a lot of them while I'm coding. Especially when I get stuck.

It's not in like cleaning while you cook. Once you have a tempo it hardly takes any longer to prepare the food but you don't leave yourself with a mess that discourages you from doing it again.


You seem to be implying that you only ever need fifteen minutes after any programming task to make all possible improvements that could ever happen to that code.




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