Clean code never saved a system.

Early on I believed that if the code was clean, the system would work. Tidy abstractions, good tests, green build — surely that was the job.

Then I built fintech infrastructure in West Africa. The people moving money at 11 PM on a Friday found every fault my test suite missed. Edge cases weren't edge cases — they were the cases. The code was clean. The system still broke.

Correctness lives in the messy reality your code meets, not in the code itself. Design for the degraded state and the hostile input first; elegance is what's left over.