If You Think It Works, It Probably Doesn't

Here's what actually kills velocity: feedback cycles.

Not the code. The waiting.

The Two-Hour Task That Takes a Week

You finish something in two hours. It doesn't get reviewed until tomorrow. There's a bug. You don't find out until the day after.

By then you're deep in something else. You don't fix it until the following day.

A two-hour task just took a week.

The Mental Trick We All Fall For

We estimate "coding hours."

We conveniently forget review time. Context-switching. The inevitable back-and-forth.

That's why the old engineer stereotype exists—everything takes two weeks. Because everything actually does.

The Fix Is Annoyingly Simple

Assume there's a bug.

If you just got it working, there's probably a bug. If you're doing frontend, there's probably three.

Test from different initial states. Click on the things you didn't change. Find the bugs now instead of discovering them in a review comment three days from now.

No Framework Required

This doesn't need a process. It doesn't need tooling. It doesn't need a meeting about meetings.

Just default to suspicion about your own code.

It'll make a bigger difference than anything else you do this year.