Why Does Development Slow?

Software development often feels like a sprint at the start and a crawl later. The piece argues that each new feature consumes optionality-choices about future design-so the codebase becomes harder to extend and slower to ship. The author illustrates this with the metaphor of a genie that compresses time but leaves a growing tax of backward-compatibility and technical debt.

By plotting feature progress against optionality, the writer shows why the typical time-series view hides the real constraint: you trade off future flexibility for immediate output. When the first feature is built, it burns many options; subsequent features inherit that loss, leading to stagnation unless you invest in restoring optionality.

The practical takeaway is to deliberately pause between features and tidy the codebase-refactor, improve abstractions, and recover lost options. This "tidy first" step makes the next feature easier to implement, re-opens future paths, and sustains velocity. The author backs the claim with personal anecdotes about repeated BPlusTree projects that repeatedly ran out of options, highlighting the cost of ignoring cleanup.

Ultimately, the article urges technical leaders to treat optionality as a first-class metric, inserting regular cleanup cycles into the delivery process. By doing so you keep the codebase healthy, reduce the hidden slowdown, and keep the team's momentum from grinding to a halt.