PracticeCritical Thinking & First Principles
Approve the cleanup?
Delete the weird config flag
The situation
Jonah has opened a cleanup pull request on the payment integration. It removes a forty-line path that, when the payment provider answers 'pending', waits two seconds and retries up to three times. Nothing else changes.
Jonah · Engineer: “It’s dead weight. Can you approve so I can get the rest of the cleanup in?”
The code is genuinely ugly and untested. Blocking cleanups on archaeology makes a codebase ossify. You have ten minutes.
What you can see
E01 · The justification
The pull request description: 'This looks unnecessary and no test covers it. The provider client already handles errors. Removing to simplify.'
E02 · The history
The path was added eighteen months ago in a commit whose message is 'fix'. The author left the company last year. No design note or ticket is linked from the commit.
E03 · What it touches
It is in the charge-creation call. The code is ugly and untested, and it is the only place in the integration with a hand-written retry.
Step 1 of 2
What do you spend the ten minutes on?
Your first choice is kept. Changing your mind later counts as a retry.