Andrey Agibalov There’s a familiar moment when you start an unfamiliar task. You don’t fully understand it yet, the deadline is real, and you still have to choose a direction. You know you’re about to make decisions with incomplete information, and that never feels comfortable.
It’s easy to think you only have two options: force a quick solution, or stop everything to research the proper one. But there’s always a quieter third option that works surprisingly well: figure out how not to do it.
You don’t need a perfect plan. You don’t need to map the whole solution space either. You just need a few boundaries — the approaches that are clearly wrong, fragile, or destined to become future debt. Those “definitely not this” constraints are enough to give shape to the entire solution.
Once those outer walls exist, almost anything you choose inside them is safe to move forward with. You avoid the knee-jerk idea that shows up first, and you avoid the one path that will quietly sabotage everything down the road. Most bad outcomes come from skipping this tiny bit of structure and wandering straight into the worst-case approach.
You don’t need brilliance on day one. You just need to avoid the worst way to do it — and that small amount of pruning is often enough to keep the whole system from drifting into chaos later.