While freelancing, I started noticing something odd.
A big part of my time wasn’t spent writing code — it was spent before that.
reading job requirements multiple times
trying to understand unclear specs
deciding if a task was even worth starting
Some days, this took hours without writing a single line of code.
It felt similar to dealing with poorly defined requirements in real projects.
The bottleneck wasn’t development speed — it was ambiguity and decision-making.
Once I looked at it this way, I started treating it like a workflow problem, not just a productivity issue.
Curious if others have noticed something similar when working with unclear requirements or freelance tasks.
Yeah, when I was freelancing a lot of time was spent understanding the existing code in the projects I was being asked to update.
Archit Mittal
I Automate Chaos — AI workflows, n8n, Claude, and open-source automation for businesses. Turning repetitive work into one-click systems.
This hit hard. I tracked my hours for a month and "coding" was ~28% — the rest was debugging, reading other people's code, writing docs, Slack, and figuring out why something broke in a system I shipped 6 months ago. The wild part: the non-coding work was where most of the leverage came from. Learning to write clearer tickets + better PR descriptions moved teams faster than any new framework.