The Myth of the Perfect System


Every engineer wants to build a perfect system. Every founder knows thatâs the fastest way to stall a business. Perfection is seductive - until it kills your timeline, your budget, and your momentum. Iâve seen developers spend weeks trying to generalize a feature that hasnât even been used yet. Iâve done it myself. It felt smart. It was dumb.
The problem
The problem with perfect systems is that theyâre designed for perfect conditions - which donât exist. Requirements change. Teams rotate. Clients forget what they asked for. You donât need a skyscraper; you need a scaffolding that doesnât collapse while youâre still laying bricks. Most systems, donât fail because of bad code - they fail because they were built for a reality that changed five minutes after the first commit.
Real struggle
A while back, I led a project where we needed a simple feature: file uploads. Instead of just wiring up S3 and calling it a day, we designed a fully abstracted, multi-cloud storage system - you know, just in case we ever needed to switch providers. Let me tell youâŚ
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It was elegant
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It was layered
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It was modular
But it also burned more than two weeks of dev time, delayed the feature launch, and guess what? We never switched providers. We didnât need the abstraction - we needed the feature to ship.
Lesson learned
My rule is now simple: systems should bend under pressure, not shatter. If it canât survive a last-minute feature request, itâs not a system - itâs a sculpture. Beautiful? MaybeâŚUseful? Probably notâŚShip what works today. Refactor when it hurts. Save the architecture diagrams for when you actually need them - and youâll know when that is.
Todayâs Log
- If you are debating between âperfectâ and âdoneâ, pick done.
- If the system feels too smart, it probably is.
- If youâre solving a problem you donât have yet, stop.
- If you can ship it today and refactor it next week, do it.
- If you think youâre building AWSâŚyouâre not.
At the end of the day, perfect systems exist - they just tend to live in graveyards, Github archives, or Notion dreams. Build what you need today. Make it scalable, make it endurable.