I've been coding for 12 years, and I still find it strange how we treat "clean code" as an absolute virtue. Last month I refactored a legacy module that took me two weeks to understand, only to have a junior dev ask why I used a pattern they'd never seen. Does writing code for the next person even mean anything when that person might not exist until three job turnovers later? Maybe we should weigh the cost of upfront clarity against the cost of delaying features that users actually need. What's your take—should readability always trump shipping speed, or are we just fetishizing a future reader who might never come?