Clean code is the waste of your time

Clean code sounds right.

Readable, structured, optimized — everything looks "correct". When you're starting, it feels like that's the goal. Write code the best way from day one.

That slowed me down.

Early on, I used to rewrite the same code again and again. Build something, then feel like there's a better way, delete it, rewrite it, repeat. It felt productive but nothing was actually getting finished. No real products, just pieces.

At that time I didn't even know what "clean" actually means properly. So I was optimizing based on half knowledge. Which just leads to wasting time.

There's a tradeoff most people don't think about:
time spent perfecting one thing vs time spent building multiple things.

One clean project vs 3 messy ones.

The messy ones teach more. Not because they are good, but because you touch more problems — APIs, bugs, UI issues, deployment, random edge cases. One "perfect" project doesn't give that.

So I changed how I write code.

First: make it work
Second: make it readable enough
Third: optimize later (if even needed)

Most code you write early will get rewritten anyway. You just don't know it yet. So trying to make it perfect early doesn't really help.

One small thing that helped — writing comments for why something exists, not what it does. The code already shows what. The why is what you forget later. Even messy code becomes usable if you know why you wrote it.

Also yeah, most of what I thought was "clean code" back then… wasn't even that clean. It just looked organized. Real quality came later after building enough stuff.

If the goal is getting better faster, volume matters more than polish. Working code > perfect code that never ships.

The only sequence that actually worked for me:

Make it work
Make it usable
Then make it better

Anything before that is just overthinking.