Jumping straight into coding feels good. You’re moving, things are happening, and you see immediate results on your screen. But if you skip the planning phase, you’re just borrowing time from your future self. And trust me, future you is not going to be happy.
Let me explain. Without a plan, you might get stuck deep in a codebase that feels more like a maze than a system. You add one feature, and suddenly something else breaks. Now you’re spending hours or even days fixing bugs that you wouldn’t have if you’d just taken a little time upfront.
When you’re writing code, you get this sense of immediate progress. The code compiles, you see the UI updates, or maybe a test passes, and it feels like things are going great. But what you don’t see—yet—is the mounting complexity.
Every decision you make on the fly, every hacky workaround, is adding weight to the system. It’s like building a house on a shaky foundation. Sure, the walls go up fast, but they’re going to come crashing down when you try to add that second floor.
I was once on a team where we had to build a new feature under a tight deadline. We were eager to get started, so we skipped the planning and dove right into coding. For the first couple of days, everything seemed to go smoothly. We were making progress, or so we thought.
But then, the issues started piling up. Functions were overlapping, data structures didn’t align, and integration between modules became a nightmare. We realized that our individual pieces didn’t fit together because we hadn’t agreed on a common structure.
We ended up spending more time fixing problems than building new features. What was supposed to be a quick addition turned into weeks of refactoring and debugging. If we had just spent a few hours planning at the start, we could have avoided most of these headaches.
How Planning Saves You
Planning doesn’t mean spending weeks in endless meetings or creating perfect diagrams. It means thinking ahead. What are the tricky parts of the system? How will the different pieces fit together? What are the edge cases?
Even something as simple as sketching out your main components or writing down a few key decisions can make a huge difference.
Here’s a scenario: You build an API without really thinking through how your routes or services should interact. A month later, your boss wants a new feature. Now you’re sweating bullets because you know that adding this feature is going to break everything else. You spend days patching things up and creating workarounds, but the truth is, the system wasn’t built to handle the new requirements.
Planning Doesn’t Have to Be a Chore
Planning doesn’t mean you have to create exhaustive documentation or get bogged down in meetings. It can be simple:
- Outline the main components. What are the building blocks?
- Define interfaces. How will these components communicate?
- Identify potential pitfalls. What could go wrong?
Note: The saying “Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning” is actually a twist on an older quote from the world of scientific research: “A few weeks in the lab will save you hours in the library.”
The original points to the idea that diving straight into experiments without research can feel productive at first, but it often leads to more time wasted in the long run. The same principle applies to coding—jumping into the code without a plan might feel like progress, but you’re just setting yourself up for more work later.