Engineering
Boundaries before features
- 1 min read
A feature built across a broken boundary costs more later than it saved — and why we spend two weeks on something that never appears on screen.
What slows a project is rarely the difficulty of its features. It is that they get built across a boundary nobody agreed on. Once a feature crosses a vague line, every later change becomes a negotiation.
So we spend two weeks designing boundaries before the first line: who owns which data, what happens when the other side falls over, and how a failure reads. This is not a document — it is contracts in the code.
The cost is visible and the return is not, until the first change arrives. Then the difference is between an edit in one file and a rewrite across five.
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