Catch the problems in your plan before you start building

A plan can look perfectly clean on paper and still hide problems that only show up halfway through building. Things like: what happens when the internet goes down? What if someone sends empty data? Is this really three days of work, or is it three weeks pretending to be three days? Engineering Review catches these before you start, when they're cheap to fix.

Rewriting something mid-build is painful and expensive. A five-minute review at the planning stage can save you days of rework later. The things it catches aren't exotic — they're the obvious stuff that's easy to miss when you're excited about starting. Missing pieces, things that depend on other things you haven't built yet, and scope that quietly grew while you weren't looking.

Run it after writing your plan but before you start building. It checks whether your approach is sound, whether you've accounted for things going wrong, whether the scope is honest, and whether you'll be able to tell if the final result actually works. You get back a marked-up review with specific issues flagged. The more confident you feel about a plan, the more it needs this review — confidence without scrutiny is how you build the wrong thing fast.

Every plan, before you start building. No exceptions. The review takes minutes. The rewrites it prevents take days.