One of the biggest traps I fell into early in my engineering career was the urge to write 'clean code' by abstracting everything too early. I'd see two similar lines of logic and immediately construct a generic helper function, complete with configurable parameters for edge cases that didn't even exist yet.
The result? A tangled web of indirection that made the codebase harder to read and twice as difficult to refactor. Duplicate code is actually far cheaper than the wrong abstraction. Prefer concrete implementation over premature complexity until a pattern truly proves it needs to be generalized.
How do you decide when logic is ready to be abstracted? Do you wait for a specific number of repetitions, or do you rely on team consensus? Let's discuss in the comments!
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