The cost of cleverness

There's a particular kind of pride in the clever solution — the one-liner that does four things at once, the abstraction that anticipates a future nobody asked about. I used to chase that feeling. In the moment, it reads like competence.

The trouble is that cleverness compounds in the wrong direction. The person who reads the code six months later — often me — doesn't get to feel clever. They get to feel confused, then a little resentful, and then they rewrite it as something boring they can actually change.

So I've started treating obvious as a feature. If a teammate can guess how a thing works before they read it, that's worth more than any saved line. Cleverness is a loan against your future attention, and the interest rate is brutal.