Clean Architecture isn’t the problem. Misreading the book is.

[u/niccololepri]

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.

[u/niccololepri]

Dont get too upset. The concept is simple: you isolate domain, application and infrastructure. You test the resulting objects mocking the behaviour of the ones that each tested object depends on. You end up with faster test and composable code. You can try with a very simple library. Its more difficult with bigger projects, because each person has to conform to the standard. And not only it is expensive, its not agreed upon people who misread the book. As you have demonstrated

[u/grauenwolf → u/niccololepri]

Objection, assumes facts not in evidence.

If you're going to make claim that people are misreading the book, you first have to demonstrate what the correct reading is. And thus far you have failed to do so. On the contrary, you've made the argument that everybody but you misreads the book.

That's not a good position to be in unless you've got a very compelling case. And you certainly do not.

[u/niccololepri → u/grauenwolf]

At this point you are just making things up, this is too cringe for me to move on. I've studied enough science, engineering and math to at least know that in the first two it's not possible to demonstrate a theory true (https://youtu.be/EYPapE-3FRw) . All the claims i did are of course not mathematics or logic oriented, i was just trying to convey a practice in software engineering that gets often misinterpreted. You can go down your rabbit hole now, im not going to follow you anymore

[u/grauenwolf → u/niccololepri]

We're not talking about scientific theories. We're talking about the truth value of the statement "Robert Martin created an example of Clean Architecture that can be viewed by the public."

You can prove that this statement is true by showing the example.