I used to measure my progress by how much code I wrote.
Long sessions. New features. Refactors. Optimizations. 
At the end of the day, I could point to something and say, “I built that.”
Felt good.
But if I’m being honest, a lot of that work didn’t actually move anything forward.
<hr>
I remember chasing a “performance issue” on a project. 
API felt slow. Users were complaining. So I went straight into fix mode.
Optimized queries. Cleaned up responses. Added caching. 
Numbers improved. Everything looked faster on paper.
But nothing changed for the user.
Still slow. Still frustrating.
That’s when it hit me, I never actually stopped to understand the problem.
The issue wasn’t the backend. It was the frontend flow. Too many steps. Too much friction.
I spent hours improving something that didn’t matter.
<hr>
That’s the part nobody really talks about.
Writing code feels like progress, even when it’s not. 
It gives you something to hold onto. Something to show.
But I’ve started realizing that a lot of what I used to build… 
didn’t need to exist in the first place.
<hr>
Now I try to slow myself down before I touch anything.
I ask myself:
<ul>
<li>What’s actually broken here?</li>
<li>Who is this affecting?</li>
<li>If I fix this, does anything really change?</li>
</ul>
And sometimes the answer is uncomfortable, the fix isn’t more code, it’s removing something, and sometimes it’s leaving it alone.
<hr>
I’m starting to see code differently now.
Every line I write is something I’ll have to deal with again later. 
Maintain it. Debug it. Explain it.
If it doesn’t clearly solve a real problem, it’s just future work I created for myself.
<hr>
I’m not perfect at this yet.
There are still days I jump straight into coding because it feels easier than thinking things through.
But I’m catching it faster now.
And the more I do, the more I realize: 
being effective has nothing to do with how much I write.
It’s about whether what I wrote needed to exist at all.
<hr>
So I’m curious How often do you realize after the fact that you solved the wrong problem?

John Liter

A developer reflects on the misconception that writing more code equals productivity. Through a personal story of optimizing the wrong part of a slow application, the author shares how they learned to pause before coding and ask whether a problem actually needs a code solution. The key insight: every line written becomes future maintenance burden, and true effectiveness is about whether the code needed to exist at all.

I Used to Think Writing More Code Meant I Was Productive