You’re Not a Developer. You’re a Factory Worker.

Developers who only focus on writing code without thinking about business impact are acting like factory workers, not engineers. Software is a liability — every feature adds maintenance cost and technical debt. Eight practices to break the feature factory cycle: estimate maintenance costs for every feature, use engineering investment and allocation reports to show business impact, keep PRs small to counter AI-inflated code volume, separate deployment from release using feature flags, wrap legacy systems in facade/translation layers, use error budgets to enforce quality conversations with stakeholders, minimize external dependencies, and always understand the problem before writing code. The goal is to build less, not more, and deliver results with the minimum viable amount of software.