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Stop writing code that future devs will hate you for

#webdev #programming #ai #coding

Why most ‘quick fixes’ rot into long-term nightmares and how to stop writing code your future self will rage at.

Image Source: Envato

My garbage code confession

Picture this: it’s midnight, I’m six cups of coffee deep, the sprint demo is in the morning, and my code won’t compile. In a haze of panic, I slapped together a function called doMagic() and jammed it into the repo with a commit message that read: “temp fix, works for now.”

It did “work.” The demo passed. I went home, crashed, and convinced myself I’d come back to clean it up later. Spoiler: I never did.

Six months down the road, that one “temp fix” had metastasized into a cursed file nobody wanted to touch. Every bug report traced back to it. A junior dev pinged me on Slack: “Hey, quick question… what does doMagic() actually do?” My honest answer? “No idea.”

The day my tech lead sighed, muttered “oh god, not this file again” during standup, I knew I had crossed into garbage territory. My clever little shortcut wasn’t clever at all it was selfish. I had traded a night of my sleep for months of my team’s sanity.

Lesson learned: garbage code isn’t code that fails. Garbage code is code that works just long enough to become everyone else’s problem.

What garbage code actually is

Let’s clear something up: garbage code isn’t the same as broken code. Broken code crashes fast and gets fixed. Garbage code is worse it runs, it ships, and then it silently poisons the repo until someone curses your name in Slack.

So what counts as garbage? A few telltale signs:

  • Unclear one-liners that read like riddles instead of logic.
  • Terrible naming (temp2, fooFinal, newnewFinal).
  • Fragile hacks that only work because of lucky assumptions.
  • Cargo-culting copy/pasting StackOverflow answers you don’t understand.
  • “Clever” shortcuts that future devs will trip over like landmines.

At its core, garbage code is selfish. It’s code optimized for the author in the moment, not for the team or for Future You. It’s “look how smart I am” instead of “look how easy this will be to maintain.”

Want a sanity check? Ask yourself: if you didn’t write this, and you opened it six months later, would you mutter “WTF” out loud? If the answer is yes, congrats you’ve got garbage.

Reference: Martin Fowler literally coined the term Code Smell. Garbage is just code that reeks so bad everyone avoids it.

Why we keep writing trash

If we all know garbage code sucks, why do we keep producing it? Short answer: because the system rewards it.

Deadlines and shortcuts

When the sprint board is on fire and your manager is refreshing Jira like it’s Twitter, the temptation to hack something together and whisper “I’ll clean it later” is strong. Problem is, “later” almost always = never.

Tutorial and copy/paste culture

We’ve all done it: copy a StackOverflow snippet at 2 AM, paste it in, pray it works. It does. You ship. Six months later, you have no idea why it works, or why it breaks the moment you upgrade dependencies.

Overconfidence in future you

We lie to ourselves: “I’ll remember what this means.” No, you won’t. Future you barely remembers what you had for lunch last Tuesday, let alone why x2_final is hardcoded to 17.

MVP trap

The deadliest excuse of all:

“It’s just a prototype.”

Prototypes have a habit of going live and then sticking around for years. Congrats, you just built a company-critical feature on duct tape.

The cost of garbage (Jenga effect)

Garbage code isn’t just annoying it’s expensive. Think of it like interest on a bad loan: every shortcut you take today adds compound pain tomorrow.

Bugs multiply

That one “quick fix” becomes the epicenter of every production incident. New code piles on top, and suddenly every release feels like Russian roulette.

Velocity collapses

Teams start slow, then grind to a halt. Each new feature takes twice as long because half the time is spent tiptoeing around landmines. Google’s own engineering productivity research shows that messy codebases directly drag down dev speed.

Onboarding hell

Ever dropped a new hire into a legacy repo full of garbage? Their first week is basically archaeological excavation. Instead of shipping, they’re decoding your utils.js file from 2019. Welcome to morale death.

Burnout fuel

Nothing drains a team faster than debugging someone else’s spaghetti at 11 PM. Garbage code doesn’t just slow projects it kills careers.

Analogy: Imagine a Jenga tower. Each “temporary hack” is a block pulled from the bottom. Looks fine… until it doesn’t. The collapse is inevitable it’s just a matter of when.

Five rules to kill garbage habits

So how do you avoid writing code that future devs will curse you for? It’s not magic. It’s discipline. These five rules are simple, but they’re the difference between a repo people build on and one they avoid like a haunted house.

1. Clarity beats cleverness

Clever code is fun to write, but painful to maintain. That one-liner might impress your reflection, but six months later it looks like an eldritch incantation.

Before (garbage):

result = [x for x in data if not any(x % y == 0 for y in range(2, int(x*0.5)+1))]

result = [x for x in data if is_prime(x)]

After (clearer):

def is_prime(n: int) -> bool:
    if n < 2: return False
    for i in range(2, int(n * 0.5) + 1):
        if n % i == 0:
            return False
    return True

Future you will actually understand the second one.

2. Name things like you care

Variables named like filler tracks (foo2, tempFinal) = pure garbage. Good names are invisible until they’re missing.

Before:

let d2 = process(x1, y1);

After:

let encryptedMessage = process(userInput, encryptionKey);

3. Keep functions short

If a function feels like a dungeon crawl, split it. Rule of thumb: if you need to add comments inside a function to section it off, that function probably needs to be broken down.

4. Comment with context, not noise

Bad:

# increment i
i += 1

Good:

# Using a set for O(1) membership checks
seen_items = set()

5. Refactor like hygiene

Don’t wait until the stench is unbearable. Clean as you go. Think daily showers, not once-a-year spring cleaning.

Tip: bake 10 minutes of refactor time into every sprint. It compounds massively.

Image Source: Envato

Tools that keep you honest

Even with the best intentions, devs are lazy. We cut corners, get cocky, and tell ourselves “it’s fine, nobody will ever see this part of the code.” That’s why you need guardrails. Tools won’t make you a better programmer but they’ll stop your worst habits from sneaking into main.

Linters and formatters

Your brain is for logic, not semicolons. Let the machines fight style wars for you.

  • JavaScript/TS: ESLint + Prettier
  • Python: Black (“Any color you like, as long as it’s Black”)
  • Go: gofmt (the dictator we actually like)

CI pipelines

Plug your linters and tests into CI/CD. If the build fails, your garbage doesn’t even make it past the repo bouncer.

Code reviews = group therapy

A solid review isn’t just about catching bugs it’s about catching habits. My favorite PR roast:

“Congrats, you just reinvented a framework inside utils.js. Can we split this before it eats us alive?”
That feedback saved months of future pain.

Pair programming

Annoying? Sure. Effective? Absolutely. Nothing kills garbage faster than another human watching you type.

Static analysis

  • SonarQube hunts down code smells.
  • CodeClimate turns maintainability into a score you can’t ignore.

Garbage vs genius (the thin line)

Here’s the hard truth: not all clever code is garbage. Sometimes you need wizardry tight loops in C, low-level bit hacks, cryptography that looks like a puzzle from Dark Souls. That’s justified complexity. The problem is when devs confuse “clever” with “good.”

When cleverness is justified

  • Performance-critical code shaving milliseconds at scale saves millions.
  • Low-level domains compilers, graphics, crypto. Complexity comes with the territory.
  • Well-documented exceptions clever is fine if you explain why and leave a paper trail.

When cleverness is selfish

  • Regex hell if your regex looks like a cat walked on your keyboard, it’s garbage.
  • Over-abstraction factory adapters for a problem that needed one function.
  • One-liner flexes if it looks like code golf, it’s not maintainable.

Quick compare

Garbage flex:

const r = s.split('').reduce((a,c,i)=>i%2?a+c:a+c.toUpperCase(),'');

Readable genius:

function weirdCase(str) {
  return str
    .split('')
    .map((char, i) => (i % 2 ? char : char.toUpperCase()))
    .join('');
}

One is cursed, the other is clear. Both “work.” Only one deserves to live in your repo.

The culture problem

Here’s the uncomfortable part: garbage code isn’t just an individual sin it’s cultural. The way a team rewards speed, pressure, or “heroics” often decides whether garbage thrives or dies.

Hero-coder worship

Too many teams idolize the “10x dev” who pulls all-nighters and ships half a feature set in a weekend. What they don’t show is the mountain of brittle hacks hidden under the hood. That “hero” isn’t saving the sprint they’re creating a booby-trapped codebase.

Mini-story: I once had a manager who applauded a teammate for “saving the deadline.” A month later, we were drowning in bugs from his spaghetti patch. Hero today, villain tomorrow.

Healthy cultures reward clarity

The best teams clap for deletions. A former lead of mine literally started a ritual: if you deleted 500 lines of garbage and replaced it with 50 clean ones, the whole squad applauded. Suddenly elegance mattered more than brute-force output.

Garbage thrives in silence

Rubber-stamped reviews and scared juniors = prime breeding ground. If people don’t feel safe asking “WTF does this mean?”, garbage festers. Bad culture turns small hacks into systemic rot.

Citation: The Mythical Man-Month the classic text that proves rushing rarely saves time.

Image Source: Envato

My redemption arc

I wish I could say I avoided garbage code by reading Clean Code early and becoming a model developer. Reality? I wrote absolute trash, got burned by it, and only then started to change.

My low point: a commit at 4:12 AM, message reading “quick fix, will refactor later.” That line became infamous in our repo. Every bug seemed to trace back to it. The day my lead told me, dead serious,

“You’re on bug duty until this is fixed properly,”

I realized I had crossed a line.

That was my wake-up call. I started treating code reviews like accountability instead of paperwork. I forced myself to read variable names out loud before committing them if I felt dumb saying it, I renamed it. And I made a rule: if a function didn’t fit on one screen, I broke it apart.

The payoff? My code stopped haunting me. Future Me actually understood Past Me. Debugging became less about archaeology and more about engineering. And funny enough, my reputation on the team went from “guy who cursed us” to “guy who cleans up.”

Lesson: you can’t erase your worst commits they live forever in git log. But you can stop adding new skeletons to the closet.

Conclusion

Here’s my hot take: garbage code isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice. Every time you cut corners with a “quick fix,” every time you name a variable temp2, every time you write something clever only you understand you’re not saving time. You’re planting landmines.

Let’s be blunt: clever code is often just selfish code. It makes you look smart today, but it costs your teammates (and your future self) months of pain. If your code needs a Rosetta Stone to decipher, it’s not genius it’s a trap.

And in the AI era? The stakes are even higher. With AI spewing boilerplate at record speed, the garbage multiplier is cranked up to eleven. Anyone can ship code now but not everyone can keep it clean, clear, and safe to maintain. The devs who thrive won’t be the fastest coders. They’ll be the ones ruthless about readability and clarity.

So here’s my ask: don’t be the dev who leaves radioactive files behind. Be the one whose codebase feels like a safe house, not a haunted mansion.

Your turn:

what’s the worst garbage code you’ve ever inherited or written? Drop your horror story in the comments. Misery loves company, and maybe we’ll all learn how to do better together.

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