The Engineer's Guide to Decoding Just

If you've spent any amount of time in software engineering then you know that word. The one that sounds innocent, maybe even helpful, but has the potential to completely break your sprint plan and push your work into the early morning. I'm talking about just. It's an ambush in language form, and it's one we've learned to be asked. Most commonly, it's from one of three sources of situational complexity. In each case, "just" conceals problems.

When "Just" comes from strategic levels

This is probably the most dangerous version of "just" that exists. It's almost always sunny and cheerful with no awareness of the technical black hole it will open.

Could you just add AI to the product? My inner voice screams: "AI?! Do we even know what this will take? Data pipelines, model training, GPU clusters, ethics, months of R&D, probably an entire team we don't have? Not a checklist item, Boss!"

When a User's World Has a 'Just' in It

The user means well. They use the software, and they have an idea. But, they tend to put "just" in front of their ideas.

Can you just make the search function work like Google? My immediate thought: "You want a multi-billion dollar, globally distributed, highly optimized search algorithm that has been developed over decades by thousands of engineers? Sure, I will 'just' make that for you on my next coffee-brake."

It's just not intuitive enough. Can you make the workflow more seamless? So, this means: "I need you to redesign the entire user experience, do hundreds of A/B quality tests, refactor all the code on the front-end, and then argue with a dozen stakeholders about the size and location of every single pixel, because 'seamless' is subjective and moves as you define it."

I just need the report to include these five new data points filtered by a dozen criteria. My brain is spinning: "Those 'new data points' come from three legacy databases that are semi-dismantled, they require complicated joins, heavy calculations, and the existing reporting engine doesn't even do what it does well. And 'filtered by a dozen criteria' means I will have to build a custom query builder along with a report."

When "Just" Comes From New Optimism

This is less painful and more... hopeful. Newly onboarded developers, full of passion and excitement, often don't appreciate the unbelievable amount of accrued cruft and complexity that has been built into a mature codebase.

I just need to change one line of code to fix the bug. My instinct: "That 'one line' is in a key utility function with no test coverage, possibly has side effects you don't even know about yet... get ready for a ton of failures in unrelated modules."

Can we just refactor the entire module to use the newest framework? My internal sigh: "While great, 'just' refactoring a very stable core module means no new feature development, reintroducing old bugs, and months spent on something that works fully today, just to follow the new shiny."

In the fast pace of the startup world, we are bullish on speed and uncertainly, we don't need to do weeks of architectural diagrams or have 10 year roadmaps for every line of code. Most of the time, we just need to "just do it" to ship, learn and iterate. That being said, hearing "just" is still a flag. It can be a signal to pause for a second - not to overemphasize plan, but to quickly assess the true blast radius. It's figuring out how to find method in the madness, because if you just do it with little thought, you will likely just create more work later.