Days in the Life of Mo

There’s a phrase every developer knows too well: “We’ll fix it later.”

Those four little words are the funeral bells for clean code. Because here’s the plot twist: “later” almost never comes. That temporary fix? It grows roots, gets a mortgage, raises kids in your codebase, and before you know it, you’re maintaining a family tree of duct-tape solutions.

Why Do Temporary Fixes Last Forever?

1. Deadlines are villains in disguise.
   When the deadline monster is breathing down your neck, you tell yourself, “It’s just a patch. I’ll circle back.” But software delivery studies have shown that time pressure pushes devs to prioritize speed over long-term quality. Translation: what was meant to be temporary becomes production law.
2. “If it works, don’t touch it.”
   There’s an unspoken rule in engineering: working code is sacred. Even if it’s held together with chewing gum and try/catch blocks, no one wants to risk breaking it. According to Lehman’s Laws of Software Evolution, systems that aren’t continually improved inevitably accumulate complexity.
3. The invisibility cloak of tech debt.
   Unlike a broken UI button or a crashing app, a quick fix that “works” is invisible to users. The cost only shows up later, when the fix breaks something else or makes future changes harder. As Martin Fowler famously put it, “If you don’t pay down technical debt, interest payments will cripple you.”

The Human Side of It

We don’t leave temporary fixes because we’re lazy. We leave them because we’re human. When you’re juggling 100 things; tickets, emails, support requests, of course you take the shortcut.

But here’s the kicker: like leaving laundry on the chair “just for tonight,” it somehow becomes the chair for laundry forever. Code works the same way. That // TODO: clean this up later comment? It’s probably going to live longer than your job at the company.

A Personal Confession

I once added what I swore was a 24-hour hack in a client project. I even left a comment in the code:

// Temporary quick fix – remove by Monday!

Dear reader, it is now… Year Two. The comment is still there. Monday never came.

What Can We Do About It?

• Document the debt. Don’t just leave a cryptic comment, track it in Jira, GitHub Issues, or wherever your team lives.
• Refactor Fridays. Some teams dedicate time just for cleanup. Small bites keep the monster tame.
• Automate tests. If you have safety nets, you’ll be braver about ripping out quick hacks.
• Call it what it is. Stop saying temporary. Say “This is a debt we’re choosing.” Naming it makes it real.

Temporary fixes live forever because they’re comfortable lies. They let us move fast today… while stealing our tomorrow. But hey, if our future selves are going to hate us anyway, we might as well leave them a funny code comment, right?

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