Code is cheap, outcomes are expensive

The best code I wrote last year was the code I talked the team out of writing.

It was a greenfield project with a good seed: get a delivery team off scattered spreadsheets and python scripts onto something structured and scalable. But the scope was gargantuan. Nothing short of “everything” was acceptable, which is never a real goal.

Stakeholders wanted to see data over time to make informed trades. After three months trying to shape something buildable, I suggested the boring answer: use Grafana.

The data was already there. Backend engineers used Grafana to monitor systems, so the graphs were battle-tested, better than anything I’d build, and almost no maintenance on our side. Configure a graph and go.

That is the whole point. Writing the code is the easy part. The expensive part is what comes after: the changes, the repairs, the upkeep that turns a shipped project into an albatross around the team’s neck.

Code is cheap. Outcomes are expensive.

So before you build, ask three questions:

• Do we need this?
• Is there a way to solve it without writing code?
• What does this look like in a year?

The best engineers I know write less code, not more.