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The Myth of the Perfect System

LA
Lazar Stankovic
•
BusinessStartUpEntrepreneur
The Myth of the Perfect SystemThe Myth of the Perfect System

Every engineer wants to build a perfect system. Every founder knows that’s the fastest way to stall a business. Perfection is seductive - until it kills your timeline, your budget, and your momentum. I’ve seen developers spend weeks trying to generalize a feature that hasn’t even been used yet. I’ve done it myself. It felt smart. It was dumb.

The problem

The problem with perfect systems is that they’re designed for perfect conditions - which don’t exist. Requirements change. Teams rotate. Clients forget what they asked for. You don’t need a skyscraper; you need a scaffolding that doesn’t collapse while you’re still laying bricks. Most systems, don’t 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 you…

✅ It was elegant
✅ It was layered
✅ 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 didn’t 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 can’t survive a last-minute feature request, it’s not a system - it’s a sculpture. Beautiful? Maybe…Useful? Probably not…Ship what works today. Refactor when it hurts. Save the architecture diagrams for when you actually need them - and you’ll know when that is.

Today’s Log

  • If you are debating between “perfect” and “done”, pick done.
  • If the system feels too smart, it probably is.
  • If you’re solving a problem you don’t have yet, stop.
  • If you can ship it today and refactor it next week, do it.
  • If you think you’re building AWS…you’re 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.