Even when cleaning up preventable messes in code, those messes were often caused or made worse by trying to "do it right the first time" and tacking on a bunch

Even when cleaning up preventable messes in code, those messes were often caused or made worse by trying to "do it right the first time" and tacking on a bunch of extra complexity in the process instead of just doing the simple thing that works for now. Start small. Iterate. Do it wrong. Embrace the fact that we're imperfect, not oracles of the future. I'll gladly prefer fixing up some shoddy code over needing to tear down and re-architecture from scratch a larger, even well designed system, that solves the wrong problem. Not all preventable problems are worth preventing. Preventing them causes other problems, if only the problem of wasting a lot of time fixing many non-problems that you mistakenly thought were potential problems in an attempt to do so.