Andrey Agibalov Every project starts with that innocent phase where “we’re just getting things off the ground.” That’s when all the future pain quietly begins. The first button. The first API call. The first hack that was supposed to be temporary. The first “TODO: fix later.” That’s when you’re not just coding — you’re writing the project’s constitution, whether you mean to or not.
Someone always goes first. And the first person to solve a new kind of problem doesn’t just solve it — they set a rule. Whatever they do becomes “how we do things here.” The next developer hits a similar task and thinks, “Oh, that’s how it’s done.” Boom — precedent established. Congratulations, your five-minute hack just became company policy.
Take a small example. You’re writing JavaScript. Someone commits a 180-character line that scrolls like a train. Code review catches it. The bad move: just reformat and move on. The better move: reformat and make a ticket called “add linter.” The best move: reformat and add the damn linter right now. Because that ticket? It’ll rot in the backlog forever. And even though you fixed that one line, nothing stops the next person from doing it again. You’ll keep catching the same thing on review — because there’s still no rule, just memory.
Another one: you’re building the first button on the frontend that sends an HTTP request to the backend. Sometimes you get a 200, sometimes you don’t. The lazy way: handle the error locally and throw an alert. Works fine, right? Until a few more developers do the same thing, and now you’ve got five alert styles and six versions of “something went wrong.” The best move would’ve been to stop right there and build a small global error handler — one popup, one place, one pattern. But no, everyone was in a hurry.
That’s the trap. Early on, everyone thinks they’re too early to care about structure. Later, everyone wishes someone had cared. The start of a project isn’t the time to move fast — it’s the time to set the laws. Because once you do something once, you’ll be doing it that way forever. So set the right precedent. If you’re the first to do it, do it properly — or enjoy watching your dirty shortcut become the norm.