The Night I Almost Deleted My Repo (repair over restart)

I didn’t plan to become a builder.
I planned to sleep.

Instead, I found myself at 2:13 a.m., forehead on the desk, watching my app throw the same error for the twelfth time. Error logs rolling like credits. Redis whispering nothing helpful. I was sure the bug was in my code. Then sure it was in my head. Then sure it was in the universe.

Earlier that day I’d told a friend I was “close.” Close is a dangerous word. Close means you stop eating. Close means you stop asking for help because you don’t want to break the momentum. Close means you convince yourself that one more try will fix it.

One more try became seven hours.

I kept thinking about the old me: the version who would say, “See? This is why you shouldn’t do this.” The version who loved the word safe, even as it made my chest tight. I could hear that voice in the glow of the monitor: go back, let it be someone else’s dream.

So I did what any responsible adult does at 2 a.m.

I opened the queue worker and restarted everything.

It didn’t help.

I swore at the code. Then I swore at myself for swearing at the code. Then I swore at the AI assistant because it confidently suggested the same non-fix three times in a row. I wanted to ask it, very politely, if it had ever touched a real queue in its life.

Here’s the honest part: I almost deleted the repo. Not out of drama. Out of fatigue. Delete is quieter than admit.

I stood up to brush my teeth and saw my face in the mirror — that slight angle your eyelids take when you’ve been bargaining with a bug. I laughed. It sounded like a cough. I remembered something I’d written on a sticky note weeks ago:

If Future-Me will still care tomorrow, Present-Me writes it down tonight.

So I wrote it down. Not the solution — I didn’t have one. I wrote the boundaries.

What broke. What I tried. What hurt.

And the hurt was this: I’d stopped trusting myself. Not the code. Me. Somewhere between optimizing a websocket channel and formatting P/L numbers, I’d started outsourcing my instincts to the assistant, to the docs, to the idea that someone else knew the right way.

I went back to the desk and did the one thing I’d avoided for hours: I opened the smallest file involved and read it like it was a letter from a friend. Line by line. Functions like short sentences. Inputs like confessions. Output like a boundary.

I found the mistake.

It wasn’t fancy. It was a single assumption that the active wallet would always be set before the realtime stream kicked in. It wasn’t. On a cold start, my “default wallet” logic was a hope, not a guarantee. So the price stream arrived on time to a room with no lights on.

I fixed it. Not with cleverness. With a boring if.

No victory music. No hero shot. Just the tiny hush that happens when the page finally behaves. I sat there, hands flat on the desk, and felt the difference between quitting because I’m done and stopping because I’m tired. Those are not the same.

People think the hard part is the knowledge. The frameworks, the patterns, the acronyms. Tonight I think the hard part is staying human while the machine whispers a million suggestions. The hard part is not turning your brain off when it’s tempting to let a tool finish the thought for you.

A friend asked me last week, “What makes you keep going?”

I said something tough-sounding at the time. Today I think the truth is smaller.

I keep going because I like the feeling of learning just enough to be dangerous to my past self. I like catching the bug before it turns into a story about who I am. I like closing the laptop after midnight and knowing I didn’t disappear on myself.

I don’t think I’m brave. I think I’m stubborn in a way that is finally useful.

Tomorrow I’ll probably break something else. I’ll probably swear again. I’ll probably ask the assistant for a hint and then argue with it like it’s a coworker who forgot what our app actually does. And if I’m lucky, I’ll write another boring if. I’ll add one more guardrail. I’ll move one inch.

Maybe that’s what building is. Not the launch screenshot or the clever thread. Just a pile of inches, stacked until it looks like a path.

I still didn’t plan to be a builder.
I planned to sleep.
But tonight, I’m glad I stayed up.

— Also on my blog (canonical): https://coinpulse.app/blog/journal/the-night-i-almost-deleted-my-repo

Curious — what made you stop rebuilding and start repairing on your projects?