22 Apr 2026
"Never scaffold. Always fully implement." — dev philosophy
One rule I've learned the hard way: never scaffold. Always fully implement.
Every time you write a stub, a skeleton, or a "TODO: implement later" — you're not saving time. You're lying to yourself. The stub becomes the implementation. The placeholder ships. The "I'll come back to this" never comes.
I used to think scaffolding was planning. It's not. It's avoidance with good intentions.
The discipline I apply now: if I'm not ready to implement it properly — I don't write it at all. No stubs. No skeletons. No half-built abstractions waiting for a future version of me to finish them.
If the requirements are clear — build the real thing. If they're not clear enough to build — clarify them first.
Scaffolding feels productive. It isn't.