[cle]

IMO code should be messy to some degree. If it's not, then I'm moving too slowly. Probably over-refactoring and over-analyzing. And usually that's a symptom of something deeper, like too much ambiguity leading to procrastination, which I can fix by scoping in more detail, writing throwaway code (ex a proof-of-concept), etc.

Obviously we don't want a complete dumpster fire of a codebase, but some mess is inevitable and healthy. First see the mess, then refactor. Refactoring before the mess is how you end up with crappy abstractions.

In the past few years I've adopted the attitude that code cleanliness isn't really that big of a deal. There are some obvious guidelines to follow around readability, encapsulation, etc., but these days I care more about system architecture than I do the code itself. Localized code is easy to change/refactor/clean up, the system itself is not.