Ship Your Ugly Code

A solo developer shares the experience of attempting a full rewrite of a Laravel SaaS project, abandoning it after four days, and returning to incremental refactoring. The core lesson: for solo developers, the biggest risk isn't bad architecture — it's never shipping. The post outlines a practical three-rule approach (new features in modular design, refactor small isolated pieces first, write missing tests) that allowed the product to launch while gradually improving code quality using PHPStan, Rector, and Pest.