Writing is Cheap

Often, in programming, somewhat counterintuitively, it's actually much faster to write more code than less code.

Examples of ways to write more:

• Types
• Tests
• Comments
• Documentation
• Notes

People often think of this as stuff to essentially "feel guilty about" and they have some vague notion that code "should have these things" and "they'll do it when they have time". But, when done well, doing all of these things together is significantly faster than just writing the code on its own. The reason is that, in an age of macro driven text editors with auto completion, readily available code samples on the internet (Stack Overflow), code generation (including AI), API generators, and so on, writing a lot of code is really cheap. And, writing words has always been pretty cheap compared to writing correct code. What's difficult and time consuming is getting code right. So, if you can opt to write more and spend less time debugging then it's usually worth the trade-off (at least if you're set up for it).