I keep thinking about this article I Sold Out for $20 a Month and All I Got Was This Perfectly Generated Terraform link and how it maps to my own experience with my own projects, one of which is a Todo app I make heavy, heavy daily use of and which has become quite important to me.

I kind of have a sense of where it’s at, architecturally, and also a lot of experience working with web apps to support that. And my wish to actually spend time interacting with the code converges toward zero the more I work on it.
It’s not that I don’t care. But the reality is that this app helps me solve problems (managing my time), and every improvement to it feels like a better investment than looking at the code and making sure it has the properties I imagine it should have to be called maintainable.

First of all: whatever “maintainable” even means in this situation, since we’ve got much more leverage now with LLMs. Of course, we also produce more. So there is surely a commensurate amount of diligence required in any case. But I doubt we can know how much without experiencing it firsthand. But that wasn’t supposed to be my point here.

Okay, coming to that point: I really feel that the way you speedrun your own projects, steering their course in real time instead of painstakingly making progress over the years, gives you a wholly different experience — namely, that of a product manager who works closely with his techies to get things done. The techies are always worried and concerned about technical debt and maintainability and the future. But really, no matter how often they voice those worries, I doubt that a PM who hasn’t been repeatedly bitten can actually pay more than lip service to understanding it. To be sure, this is meant empathetically. They shouldn’t. For how should it be clear how much worry is justified, and how much is just the devs buying themselves time?

And now I’m here wearing both hats. You understand? It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I want — need — stuff done. And I feel that I can afford to postpone dealing with any potential mess. Which in part stems from my confidence as a programmer, and in part from my sense, as a dev in general, that it probably won’t even happen.