A common mistake in software projects is trying to make every important architecture decision too early.
I understand why it happens. At the beginning of a project, everything feels connected. You want the system to be clean. You want to avoid future rewrites. You want to prove to yourself, your team, or your client that the foundation is solid. So you start thinking ahead: scaling, permissions, integrations, data ownership, billing, admin tools, observability, deployment pipelines, internal abstractions, API boundaries.
Some of that thinking is useful. Some of it is necessary. But some of it is just guessing with architectural confidence.
While building products and mentoring developers, I’ve noticed that architecture problems often come from two opposite mistakes. The first is under-thinking decisions that are expensive to change later. The second is over-thinking decisions that would become much clearer after a small amount of real usage. Both mistakes can hurt a project. The hard part is telling them apart.
Architecture Is Partly About Timing
When developers talk about architecture, we usually talk about patterns, structure, scalability, maintainability, or technical debt. Those things matter, but they do not tell the whole story.
A decision can be technically correct and still be made too early. Another decision can feel uncomfortable to postpone and still be the right thing to delay. This is where architecture becomes less about diagrams and more about judgment.
For example, deciding how data ownership works in a multi-tenant SaaS product is usually not something you want to improvise late. If you get it wrong, you may end up rewriting core tables, changing authorization logic, migrating customer data, and fixing assumptions spread across the entire codebase.
On the other hand, designing a perfect internal analytics dashboard before anyone uses the product may be premature. The dashboard might feel important, but the actual questions you need to answer will probably change once real users start interacting with the system.
Both are architecture decisions. But they should not receive the same level of attention at the same time. That distinction is easy to miss.
The Temptation to Design the Final System
One of the most tempting things at the start of a project is to design the final version of the system.
It feels responsible. It feels mature. It feels like “real engineering.” You imagine the future version of the product and try to prepare for it. You add abstractions because you know the code might grow. You introduce configuration because different users might need different behavior. You create flexible data models because requirements might change. You separate modules because the system might become large.
Sometimes this pays off. Good early decisions can save months of pain later. But often, the future you are designing for is not the future that actually arrives. The product changes. Users behave differently than expected. The feature you thought would be central becomes secondary. The simple workflow turns out to be more valuable than the flexible one. A technical constraint you worried about never becomes a bottleneck.
The problem is not thinking ahead. The problem is treating speculation as certainty. That is how teams end up with complex systems built for requirements they never validated.
The Opposite Mistake: Moving Too Fast Past Expensive Decisions
Of course, the answer is not “just ship messy code and figure it out later.” That advice can be just as dangerous. Some decisions really do become painful when postponed too long. If you delay them because you want to move fast, you may create a hidden architecture debt that compounds quietly.
Authentication is a good example. At first, it can seem like a simple implementation detail. Add login, store users, protect routes. But authentication often connects to permissions, billing, organizations, invitations, account recovery, audit logs, integrations, and support workflows.
Data ownership is another example. If you are building a SaaS product, the question “who owns this record?” can become foundational. Is the data owned by a user, a team, an organization, a workspace, or a customer account? Can users belong to multiple organizations? Can records move between them? What happens when someone leaves?
These are not questions you want to discover accidentally after the product is already in use.
The same applies to billing boundaries, tenant isolation, permission models, compliance constraints, and certain integration contracts. These decisions shape the rest of the system. Changing them later often means changing not just code, but mental models. So the challenge is not to avoid architecture. The challenge is to identify which parts of the architecture are real constraints and which parts are guesses.
A Simple Planning Model: Now, Soon, Later
One practical habit I like is labeling decisions as now, soon, or later. It is a small exercise, but it forces a useful conversation before a project gets too deep into implementation.
Now decisions are expensive to reverse. They affect the foundation of the system and will be difficult to change once other work depends on them. Examples might include:
- data ownership
- tenant boundaries
- authentication model
- authorization and permissions
- billing structure
- core domain model
- external API contracts
- deployment constraints
These decisions deserve careful thought early. They do not need to be perfect, but they need to be intentional.
Soon decisions are important, but you do not yet have enough information to make them well. You know they matter, but deciding too early would involve too much guessing. Examples might include:
- reporting needs
- admin workflows
- advanced onboarding flows
- detailed notification behavior
- deeper integrations
- team management features
- internal tooling
These decisions should not be ignored. They should be tracked. But the best next step may be to learn more before locking in a design.
Later decisions are mostly speculative. They may become important someday, but solving them now would add complexity without enough evidence. Examples might include:
- scaling strategies for traffic you do not have
- plugin systems before extension points are clear
- complex role hierarchies before roles are validated
- generic workflow engines for two workflows
- multi-region infrastructure before there is a real need
- advanced customization before customers ask for it
These are the decisions that often create premature architecture. They feel like preparation, but they can slow the project down and make the product harder to change.
Why This Helps
The value of the now / soon / later model is not that it gives you a perfect answer. It gives you a better conversation. Instead of debating whether something is “good architecture” in the abstract, you can ask more useful questions:
- What happens if we get this wrong?
- How expensive is this to change later?
- What other work will depend on this decision?
- Do we have enough information to decide now?
- Are we solving a current constraint or an imagined future one?
- Can we design a smaller version that keeps the option open?
These questions move the discussion away from personal preference. They make trade-offs visible. A senior engineer might want a cleaner abstraction. A founder might want to ship faster. A product person might want flexibility. A junior developer might want clearer guidance. None of those instincts are wrong, but they can pull the project in different directions.
Labeling decisions by timing gives everyone a shared language. It also reduces the emotional weight of postponing something. “Later” does not mean “we do not care.” It means “we do not have enough evidence to make this worth the complexity today.” That distinction matters.
An Example: Building a New Feature
Imagine you are building a feature that lets users invite teammates into a workspace. At first glance, this sounds straightforward. Add invitations, send emails, let users accept, and attach them to the workspace.
But quickly, architecture questions appear. Can a user belong to multiple workspaces? Are permissions workspace-specific or global? Can users invite others with equal permissions? What happens if an invited user already has an account? Can someone remove the original workspace owner? Does billing depend on seats, active users, or workspace members?
Some of these decisions are foundational. If you ignore workspace ownership or permission boundaries, you may create a system that works for the first demo but breaks as soon as real teams use it. Those are now decisions.
Other decisions might be important but not urgent. For example, maybe you will eventually need detailed audit logs, custom roles, domain-based access rules, or SSO. These could matter later, especially for larger customers. But if you are still validating whether teams want the product at all, building all of that immediately may be too much. Those are probably soon or later decisions, depending on your users.
The goal is not to build the smallest possible version blindly. The goal is to build the smallest version that does not trap you. That is a very different standard.
The Cost of Premature Flexibility
One reason this is difficult is that flexibility feels safe. A flexible system seems like it will protect you from future changes. If you add enough abstraction, configuration, and extension points, maybe you will not need to rewrite things later.
But flexibility has a cost. Every abstraction needs a name. Every configuration option needs to be understood. Every generic system creates more states to test. Every extension point can make the actual product behavior harder to reason about.
Premature flexibility often increases the surface area of the system before the team understands the problem deeply enough.
This does not mean abstractions are bad. Good abstractions are one of the best tools we have in software engineering. But the best abstractions usually emerge from repeated patterns, not imagined ones.
If you have built the same workflow three times and the shape is becoming obvious, abstraction can simplify the system. If you are building the first version and guessing about the next five, abstraction can hide uncertainty instead of solving it. That is where many projects accumulate accidental complexity.
The Cost of Postponing Too Much
There is also a cost to postponing too much. If every difficult decision gets pushed into the future, the system becomes a pile of local optimizations. Each feature works on its own, but the product becomes harder to extend. Concepts are duplicated. Data relationships become inconsistent. Permissions are patched in different places. The team starts saying things like “just be careful with that part of the codebase.”
This is often how technical debt appears. Not from one bad decision, but from many small decisions made without a shared model.
That is why “later” needs discipline. If a decision is postponed, it should still be visible. Write it down. Add a note to the planning document. Put it in the technical backlog. Mention what information would make the decision easier. Define what signal would move it from later to soon, or from soon to now.
Postponing a decision is only useful if the team remembers that it was postponed intentionally. Otherwise, it becomes avoidance.
Architecture as Risk Management
The more I think about this, the more I see architecture as a form of risk management. Not risk management in a bureaucratic sense. More like practical engineering risk: what can break, what can become expensive, what can slow learning, and what can make future work harder than it needs to be.
Good architecture does not eliminate uncertainty. It helps you move through uncertainty without creating unnecessary traps. Sometimes that means making a strong decision early. Sometimes it means keeping an option open. Sometimes it means building something simple because the product has not earned more complexity yet.
The skill is knowing which situation you are in. This is also why architecture cannot be separated from product thinking. A technically elegant design for the wrong product direction is still waste. A fast implementation that blocks necessary product evolution is also waste. Engineering judgment lives in the trade-off.
What I’m Taking From This
The practical takeaway is simple: before building a feature, make a short decision map. Write down the main decisions the feature touches. Then label each one:
Now: expensive to reverse, needs early clarity
Soon: important, but more information would help
Later: speculative, not worth solving yet
Then ask one more question for each decision:
What would make this decision easier to make?
For a now decision, the answer might be a short design review, a prototype, or a conversation with someone who has solved a similar problem before.
For a soon decision, the answer might be usage data, customer feedback, or a narrower first version.
For a later decision, the answer might be nothing yet. The right move may be to avoid adding complexity until the need becomes real.
This exercise does not need to be heavy. It can fit into a planning document, a GitHub issue, or a short architecture note. The point is not ceremony. The point is clarity.
Why I Care About This While Building Hakkle
This is one of the ideas behind Hakkle.
Not that developers need another tool to write more code. We already have a lot of help there. The harder problem is often deciding what should be built, what should be postponed, and which trade-offs are worth accepting.
While building Hakkle, I keep coming back to the same theme: software projects need better thinking around planning, architecture, prioritization, and momentum.
A developer can write good code and still get trapped by a bad sequence of decisions. A team can move fast and still spend months unwinding choices that were made too casually. A founder can ship quickly and still overbuild the wrong parts of the product.
The code matters. But the decisions around the code often matter more.
That is what makes software engineering difficult and interesting. It is not only about knowing patterns, tools, or frameworks. It is about knowing when to commit, when to wait, and when to keep the system simpler than your instincts want it to be. The next time I start planning a feature, I want to be more deliberate about that. Not by designing the perfect system upfront, and not by avoiding architecture altogether.
Just by asking a better question:
Which decisions need to be made now, and which ones should earn their place later?
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