I had a working system. 826 tests. A functional controller, planner, orchestrator, scanner pipeline. Real code doing real things.
I deleted all of it.
Not deleted exactly — restructured. But it felt like deleting. The entire controller/ directory, every import path, every module reference. Replaced with a clean sentinel/ package structure that would actually scale. Six phases rebuilt in a single session.
The sunk cost conversation with yourself is a strange one. You know the right answer intellectually — if the foundation is wrong, fix it now before everything else is built on top of it. But when you’re staring at 826 passing tests and thinking about how long it took to get there, the temptation to just keep patching is real.
What made the decision easier was that I could already see the problems accumulating. Import paths that didn’t make sense. Module boundaries that would get worse with every feature. The kind of structural debt that’s invisible at 5,000 lines and paralysing at 20,000.
So I did it. Phase 0 through Phase 6, one after the other, restructuring the package, migrating the database layer, rewiring every integration. Somewhere in the middle of it I accidentally committed 169 Rust build artifact files and had to remove them in the next commit. Classic. That’s the kind of mistake you make once and never again.
By the end I had a cleaner codebase, the same test count, and a structure that could actually support what I was planning to build next.