No patterns, files all in root, dead code next to living, no tests, a large surface area of features with breaking changes hard to notice - engs heads down yet moving in circles. I was helping a friend who is a cofounder / CTO a while back address these exact issues. And address them we did.

While we may not like to admit it, all gas no brakes is a common state of startups and eventually grinds work to a halt. In our newly found agentic world, this can and is becoming more and more exacerbated, LLMs are great at matching patterns…or hallucinating new ones. A key component of tech debt that I’ve found time and again, is that it’s not really a technical problem and has very little to do with the skill of a team. It’s cultural, it’s habitual, it’s a way of working and it’s contagious.

You can even see it accrue in a kitchen as someone is cooking. At some point, we need to clean the meat juice off the cutting board so we can prep the salad.

It’s not enough to just clean it, it must be a self reinforcing loop. When we create a “way things are done around here” and sustain it - it becomes self sustaining. When I joined the team as a contractor, it was painful on all levels. The dev environment was fickle, prod deployment was manual, there were a million git branches, spaces mixed with tabs, you get it. We made incremental changes, I created patterns through adding a new feature and their team started to match these patterns. This was a space of pure collaboration, hearing and seeing where they were hurting and seeing what I could bring to alleviate it.

We added linting, formatting, scaffolding for the testing framework, created consistent naming patterns, moved files into respective folders, shifted their architecture on how data was passing through the app. We created the basis for a consistent, documented and testable workspace. The team completed the work over time, following the patterns was effortless.

There was resistance at first, thinking that we would have to rewrite the whole app but the changes were painless, sped them up instead of slowed them down. I was able to model the changes through working with them hands on and they were able to follow through with it. We created not only a new way for them to work but a new way of seeing their workspace. It’s not just about the output, the process we go through to get a specific outcome is absolutely essential. This applies directly to agentic development, LLMs are incredibly good at output, but process is wildly varied - when we create consistency, they tend to follow it to a T.

I received a text from that friend over a year later thanking me for the work we did, and that their codebase and team is in the best place it’s been and has been continually improving from that moment.

I’m honed in on making “the way things are done ‘round here” not only productive, but joyful as a direct felt experience. If you feel things in your org are a little crunchy - reach out, let’s chat about it!