It’s 2018 and your coworker just sent you a 400 line pull request. You get a cup of coffee and sit down to review it. It’s beautiful. Elegant micro-refactors. Crispy method names. You catch a few things, but that’s ok. It’s part of the dance. They didn’t consider extensibility on part of their API. Here’s a comment buddy. They respond in an hour saying they think we should do one piece differently than your comment. Hey let’s jump into a room and figure it out. We can’t just agree to disagree, this code is too important. The PR merges and goes to prod. You feel a shared sense of ownership and accomplishment. That night you go to sleep and dream of that code. You can still see the shapes of it on the backs of your eyelids, your IDE syntax highlighting sparking neurons in your reptile brain. You go to work the next day ready to go. You understand the system. N is your foundation. Time to build n+1.