this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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Maybe I've been lucky with the people I got to work with so far (and I definitely am), but I know of no professional software engineer that would voluntarily subject themselves to such a long feedback loop. I guess some of the juniors try to work this way sometimes, but they learn fairly quickly not to. The best ones I know work incrementally. Small change, run, small change run, and so on.
Small change and run works for small ideas. Sometimes you have a big idea that's hard to break down into small chunks.
Every big change is ultimately just a series of small changes. It takes skill and engineering chops to be able to break up big ideas into small steps with quick feedback loops, but it can be done. Usually worth the effort too.
Not every big change is necessarily something you can meaningfully break up into small changes. Sometimes when you could break it up into small changes, you have to change its structure in a meaningful way to half-implement it and test out that half-version. It takes experience to know when it's best to get the whole structure expressed it code, then to go back and tweak it based on any compiler errors. Most of the time the compiler errors are very minor things like a typo, so you don't lose any meaningful time fixing them.