Refactor before reinventing: the importance of clean code

The biggest bottleneck in software development isn’t writing code—it’s everything around it. Developers spend most of their time untangling messy codebases, migrating APIs across hundreds of files, debugging 2am production incidents, refactoring legacy systems, writing brittle tests, and jumping between Jira, Slack, docs, and their IDE. ~ saw this in a newsletter. thought it was worth sharing

I often write the API documentation before the code. Why? 🔹 Forces clarity 🔹 Reduces confusion 🔹 Aligns business + dev early Docs first → cleaner builds later.

Off‑the‑shelf copilots often miss your stack. Building an internal dev agent can be worth it—if you treat it like a platform capability. Map the jobs‑to‑be‑done (PR triage, test generation, deployment summaries) and choose a runtime that fits your standards. Integrate with Git, CI/CD, issue trackers, and knowledge bases. Version system prompts, tool schemas, and guardrails in Git, right next to evaluation harnesses. Operate with governance. Issue bot accounts, log every interaction, and enforce human approval before changes land in main. Provide dashboards for latency, success rate, and cost so engineering and finance can steer together. Pilot with one or two teams, compare to baseline, and iterate quickly. Publish learnings before onboarding more teams. Use the checklist to structure architecture, governance, and the pilot: https://zurl.co/mZyfr

We Lost $1M Because Nobody Asked "What's a Doorbell Adapter? "Build a new API for the doorbell adapter." That seven-word requirement cost us $50K and two weeks of developer time. The wicked brutal part? Sully's team did this twice a month at Dominion.net. Do the math—that's over $1M annually in pure waste. The Friday "refinement" meetings were a joke: • 15 people crammed in a room • PM talking for 50 minutes straight • 10 minutes for questions • Developers discovering problems AFTER starting work The transformation was simpler than you'd think: ✅ Added pre-refinement (2-3 people max) ✅ Created actual Definition of Ready ✅ Made refinement a conversation, not a lecture ✅ Gave developers time to THINK before coding Results in 6 weeks: → Tickets refined per session: 3 to 10+ → Mid-sprint surprises: 80% to 20% → Rework dropped 60% ------------------------------------------ The uncomfortable truth? Your developers aren't slow. Your requirements are broken. Every hour saved rushing requirements cost 10 hours in development. Every unclear requirement costs 5x in rework. Full story on how this mess was fixed (and saved that million) is on my blog [ link in comments! ] and in my upcoming book, "The Process Mechanic™ - 𝘈 𝘚𝘦𝘭𝘧-𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘛𝘦𝘢𝘮 𝘚𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺." What's the most expensive vague requirement your team ever built? 🔔 Ring the bell if you like it ♻️ Repost to share more Sully’s Stories. 🎯Follow me for more like this. #SullysStories #ProductManagement #Agile #Requirements #SoftwareDevelopment #TeamTransformation

Data teams don’t fail because they’re unclear — they fail because their goals are. It seems to be a common challenge across companies that upper management expects data teams to understand requests intuitively. Over the years, I’ve learned that my team is faster, more accurate, and far more efficient when requests come with clear requirements documentation. Asking an artist to paint a masterpiece landscape without any further details opens entire worlds of interpretation — and the chances of seeing your exact vision reflected on the canvas are next to none. Data works the same way. Give your teams the who, what, where, how, and why, and they’ll deliver results that not only meet expectations — they’ll exceed them.

The hardest bug to fix is misalignment. Code can be refactored. APIs can be rewritten. Systems can be rebuilt. But when people, priorities, or goals fall out of sync, No pull request can save that. Misalignment is invisible at first. Deadlines slip a little. Decisions slow down. Energy spreads thin. Then suddenly, no one’s building the same thing anymore. Great teams debug alignment before debugging code: ✔ Clarify the why before the what ✔ Sync outcomes, not just tasks ✔ Ship direction, not chaos Because once alignment breaks, execution is just noise with nice dashboards.

Last week we shipped upgrades that make Codegen faster, more resilient, and ready for broader enterprise use: ☑️ New Kanban Dashboard – feature-flagged rollout, smoother drag-and-drop, tighter type safety ☑️ Repository page fixes – resolved hydration issues for rock-solid loading ☑️ PR review improvements – cleaner defaults, fewer surprises ☑️ Sandbox expansion – multi-provider architecture (Modal, CodeSandbox, Runloop, Codegen) for flexible dev environments ☑️ GitHub integration – agents can now upload artifacts up to 100 MB directly to a repo Plus sharper analytics and refined pagination for a smoother UI. Codegen is building the OS for code agents — and every layer just got stronger. 👉 Read the full weekly diff here: https://shorturl.at/eFJUG

🌟 New Blog Just Published! 🌟 📌 3 Golden Rules for Winning Developer Platform Design 🚀 ✍️ Author: Hiren Dave 📖 Speed to market today hinges on shared tooling and infrastructure. When each team stitches together its own toolchain, hidden friction multiplies-authentication swaps, inconsistent CI pipelines,...... 🕒 Published: 2025-10-03 📂 Category: Tech 🔗 Read more: https://lnkd.in/dZWvNdTu 🚀✨ #developerplatform #platformdesign #devtools

Pleased to share a short demo of a feature I implemented using [Device_preview]. The video shows the implementation, highlights the challenges I encountered, and the final result. DM me for the code or technical details.