You write it for today.
A quick fix.
A stopgap.
A thing to get us through this one release.
The future keeps it anyway.
Nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution.
The script you meant to throw away
is running in production five years later,
holding up a business that never knew it was scaffolding.
We build for the problem in front of us.
But the code does not know it was temporary.
It just keeps working,
until working becomes law,
until nobody remembers there was ever a choice.
So build the temporary thing
as if it might become permanent.
Because it might.
Name it honestly.
Leave a door for the next person to replace it.
Assume someone you will never meet will inherit it,
tired, at midnight, with no context.
Be kind to that stranger.
That stranger is the future.
And that stranger is sometimes you.
The systems we live inside now
were once someone's Tuesday afternoon.
A default nobody revisited.
A shortcut that hardened into a standard.
A guess that everything after it assumed was true.
That is how the future is actually made.
Not by grand plans.
By small decisions that forgot to expire.
You are making them today.
The thing you choose to reuse instead of rethink.
The pattern you copy without asking why.
The workaround you promise to clean up later.
Later is a country the future lives in.
So decide with care,
even when it is small,
even when it is temporary,
especially then.
The future is not a place you will arrive.
It is a place your choices arrive first,
and wait for you.
Build like they are already there.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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