Dev reflection - January 30, 2026

Hey, it’s Paul. January 30th, 2026.

So here’s something that happened yesterday that I’m still thinking about. Seven different projects—completely unrelated work, different domains, different goals—all hit the same wall on the same day. And the response was identical across all of them: stop building, start documenting.

Not because someone mandated it. Not because there was a process checklist. Because the cost of not having it written down finally exceeded the cost of writing it down.

Most organizations hit this moment. Most of them miss it.

Here’s what I mean. You’re building something—could be software, could be a team, could be a strategy—and early on, the decisions live in people’s heads. That works. Everyone knows why you chose this approach over that one. The principles are implicit. The boundaries are understood.

Then something shifts. Someone asks “should we add this feature?” and instead of a quick answer, you’re relitigating first principles. “Wait, what are we actually building here?” Three hours later, you’ve had the same conversation you had six months ago, and you’re not sure you reached the same conclusion.

That’s documentation debt. Like financial debt, it compounds. Every undocumented decision makes the next decision harder. Every implicit principle becomes a source of inconsistency.

The threshold isn’t gradual. You don’t slowly realize you need documentation. You hit a wall. Yesterday, seven walls.

The pattern I noticed: the documentation that emerged wasn’t aspirational. It was archaeological. These weren’t principles written in advance and then followed—they were principles extracted from decisions already made, then codified so future decisions could reference them.

This matters because it inverts how most organizations think about documentation. The standard approach is: define your principles, then make decisions that align with them. The reality is often: make decisions under pressure, then figure out what principles would have led you there, then write those down so you can be consistent going forward.

Neither approach is wrong. But the second one is honest about how work actually happens.

Here’s what surprised me most: the “Out of Scope” sections mattered more than the roadmaps.

Every project ended up with explicit documentation of what it won’t do. Not just what it will do—what it refuses to do, and why. No team collaboration features. No social integrations. No plugin systems.

This is constraint as strategy. It solves a problem that plagues every growing project: scope creep through accumulated yeses.

When boundaries are implicit, every feature request triggers a full evaluation. “Should we add X?” becomes a philosophical debate about identity and direction. When boundaries are explicit—documented, with rationale—the same question becomes a lookup. Check the constraints. If it’s out of scope, the answer is no, and here’s why we decided that.

The alternative is death by a thousand reasonable requests. Each one makes sense in isolation. Together, they transform what you’re building into something unrecognizable.

I’ve seen this in consulting work for years. Organizations that can’t say no to good ideas end up unable to execute on great ones. The discipline isn’t in choosing what to do. It’s in documenting what you won’t do, and holding that line.

There’s a deeper question here about decision-making that I keep circling back to.

One project built something I’d call a decision classification system. Not every choice requires the same level of attention. Some decisions are routine—make them quickly, move on. Some are significant—worth careful thought but not escalation. Some are high-stakes—reversibility is low, consequences are high, someone needs to be interrupted.

The interesting part isn’t the classification itself. It’s the recognition that knowing which category a decision falls into is itself a skill. And it’s a skill that can be externalized.

Think about delegation in any organization. The question isn’t whether someone is smart enough to make good decisions. The question is whether they know which decisions they should make independently and which ones require approval. That’s judgment about judgment. Meta-decision-making.

What I’m seeing is that this can be systematized without being bureaucratized. You don’t need approval workflows and sign-off chains. You need clear principles about what constitutes routine versus high-stakes, and you need those principles documented and shared.

The manager who says “just use your judgment” without defining the boundaries of that judgment isn’t empowering anyone. They’re creating anxiety and inconsistency. The manager who says “here are the decisions you own, here are the ones you escalate, here’s how to tell the difference”—that’s actual delegation.

One more pattern worth noting: the tension between early unification and later cleanup.

Some projects chose to build abstraction layers upfront—accept complexity now to prevent duplication later. Others built incrementally and now face inconsistency that needs standardization.

Neither approach is wrong. The right answer depends on whether the underlying landscape is converging or diverging, and whether the cost of duplication exceeds the cost of abstraction.

This is a bet about the future disguised as a technical decision. Most organizations make it implicitly, without recognizing they’re betting at all.

The question I’m sitting with: when does documenting uncertainty become useful versus paralyzing?

Several projects ended up with explicit “Open Questions” sections—decisions that haven’t been made yet, listed and acknowledged. This is honest. It shows flexibility. It prevents premature commitment.

But it also invites endless deliberation. If the question is documented as open, does that mean it stays open? Does acknowledging uncertainty create permission to avoid resolution?

I don’t have a clean answer. What I notice is that the projects that seemed healthiest had both: documented principles and documented questions. Confidence about what’s decided, humility about what isn’t.

That’s probably the balance worth aiming for. Not certainty everywhere—that’s delusion. Not uncertainty everywhere—that’s paralysis. Clarity about which is which.

So here’s where I’m landing: documentation isn’t about creating artifacts. It’s about enabling different kinds of work. The question isn’t “do we have docs?” It’s “what can we do now that we couldn’t do before?”

If the answer is “make faster decisions, onboard people more easily, prevent scope creep, delegate with confidence”—then the documentation is working. If the answer is “feel good about having docs”—it’s not.

The test comes six months from now. Not whether the documents exist, but whether they changed anything.

That’s what I’m watching for.