[hakunin]

Couple of points on this.

1. A lot of problems arise from too few people working on too many things. If it's one-two devs and backlog is growing, the problem is not that you have no time to fix things, but that you're understaffed. If you have enough people, then from the business perspective it shouldn't even be that noticeable that someone is refining previous work, while someone else is building the next thing.

2. If you're not understaffed, then the best time to clean up new code is during or immediately after writing it. A phrase I like to use is "while it's still fresh in memory". You're saving time and not adding new bugs, by not having to remember everything again, load all that context back into your head.

[godelski]

> If you're not understaffed

And it's worth noting that having some fat is good. I can get it when you're a startup and you're trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but at some point of time you need some fat. Too much fat is bad, but no fat is also bad. Startups run lean because they have to but when big businesses run too learn, it's called anorexia.

[pjungwir]

Indeed, if you read The Goal or The Phoenix Project, they call this "slack". There is a whole theory about why slack matters.

[BobaFloutist]

Another way of looking at it is that fat serves a purpose in the body. It's true that if you're optimizing for a very narrow outcome, very low (but not no) fat bodies can look ideal, but for one thing, that's actually a pretty unhealthy body, and for another, the best weight lifters in the world actually have pretty substantial fat reserves to support and sustain their muscles.

No fat can help for going fast and efficient, but it prevents you from going strong.