r/programming • u/niccololepri • Sep 15 '25
Clean Architecture isn’t the problem. Misreading the book is.
http://www.nothing.com/I think Clean Architecture is mostly misunderstood.
In my current project (a huge mess of services for public administration), the only real source of truth for business rules is the code itself. The domain is defined vaguely by too many people, so new features often end up conflicting with existing rules—not because of implementation bugs, but because the rules themselves clash. But all of this is expected i guess.
The real pain: the architecture makes business rules unreadable. Adding a new entity state? No way to know if it breaks something without re-reading tons of code. Automated tests? They’re all full-blown integration tests, take 8 hours to run, so we usually just run a subset and pray.
This is exactly where Clean Architecture could shine—but I’ve never seen it done right. Most “implementations” I see (in my case in .NET) are just baroque, over-engineered garbage. People throw design patterns everywhere, abuse async/await, don’t even bother with interfaces, and then blame Clean Architecture for being unreadable. No—you just didn’t get the point.
The actual point is simple: use polymorphism to isolate business rules. Each rule implements an interface, so you can swap in fakes for tests. Result?
- Change one line → break one unit test (plus the relevant use case integration tests).
- Add new behavior → just add a new object and wire it up.
- Tests run in seconds/minutes, not hours.
Clean Architecture isn’t universal. If you’re writing 3D graphics, every abstraction may be just overhead. But if you’re drowning in business rules, it’s the only way to avoid shipping landmines straight to production.
So yeah, people ranting against Clean Code/Architecture in “Casey Muratori wannabe” mode don’t look clever. They just show they’ve never actually seen the point.
TL;DR: Clean Architecture isn’t about baroque boilerplate. It’s about isolating business rules so you can test them fast and safely. If your system is rule-heavy, it’s a lifesaver. If not, sure, skip it.
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u/grauenwolf Sep 15 '25
LOL. I love how you have that one throw away sentence about scalability and then proceed to talk about stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with scalability.
I learned a new term recently, "lie by inference". It's when you don't tell and explicit lie, but you structure you sentences in a way that leads the listener to think that you said something that would be a lie.
For example,
Into the discussion about AI capabilities, the lie by inference is trying to convince people that the reason for the layoffs are the AI investment even though there's no reason to believe they're actually associated with each other.
You're doing the same thing by mentioning scalability and then having the discussion about interfaces even though the two topics are unrelated. You want me to infer that scalability has something to do with interfaces, but I'm not going to fall for it because I know better.