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4 Tips to Avoid Rushing to Code (and Building the Wrong Thing)

Cesar Aguirre on March 16, 2026

You spent days on your JIRA ticket... only to be told to redo it after your team lead reviewed your code? A few years ago, I was working on a hote...

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Mykola Kondratiuk • Mar 24

had almost the exact same experience - built out a whole feature the way I thought made sense, and it turned out my mental model of the problem was just wrong from the start. the question thing is underrated. I started framing it as "here is my plan, what am I missing" instead of "is this ok" - gets way more useful pushback because people respond to concrete plans differently than open questions. two minutes of that conversation saves a day of wrong work

Cesar Aguirre • Mar 24

I started framing it as "here is my plan, what am I missing" instead of "is this ok"

Great idea! And it shows we've already done some work. I like this rephrame.

Mykola Kondratiuk • Mar 24

yeah exactly - it also forces you to do the thinking first instead of outsourcing it. the plan being there means you have something to defend or update, not just accept

Josue Chambilla • Mar 25

It reminds me of Eric Ries' book "The Lean Startup," where we must first ask ourselves, "Should it be created?" and if so, create it in parts so as not to advance too much. And if it's wrong, we don't have to throw everything away, but rather "pivot" and change the dynamics and start from where it was working.

Cesar Aguirre • Mar 25

That works for startups and for JIRA tickets/GitHub issues too...Putting that recommendation into my to-read list :)

Josue Chambilla • Mar 26

If it helps, you can also read this article that I found while browsing the topic. I Stopped Writing Code First, And My Productivity Doubled

Harsh • Mar 16

This is painfully accurate. The rush to code syndrome is something almost every junior developer goes through and honestly, even seniors fall into it when deadlines loom. The one-page spec tip is gold. I've started doing something similar: a quick design doc in a Google Doc before touching any code. It takes 15 minutes but saves days of rework. The hardest lesson in our field is that typing is the easy part; thinking is what actually matters.

Cesar Aguirre • Mar 17

These days, my preferred version is a quick, dirty PR with a proof of concept

The hardest lesson in our field is that typing is the easy part; thinking is what actually matters.

100%

Baltasar García Perez-Schofield • Mar 16 • Edited

Of course, once you're done, don't forget to delete the noisy comments. Remember: names over comments and types over names.

Very true! Another great tip.

Cesar Aguirre • Mar 16 • Edited

Thanks! Probably something I learned from a book. I think it was Code That Fits Into Your Head or something like that.

Elmar Chavez • Mar 17

Thanks for this post. I agree, always be a good communicator and that lands as even more important than the code itself. Code is cheap but context is expensive.