Science Quote by Miguel de Icaza

“Catch problems when they are just introduced” is the developer’s version of public health: prevent the outbreak, don’t romanticize the cure. Miguel de Icaza’s line is plainspoken, almost stubbornly unpoetic, and that’s the point. It smuggles a cultural argument inside a technical tip: quality isn’t an end-of-project ceremony, it’s a habit that has to run as automatically as the code itself.

The intent is pragmatic. Running a test suite continuously turns mistakes into small, traceable events instead of late-stage mysteries. Subtext: every hour you delay feedback, you’re choosing a more expensive kind of truth. When a bug survives long enough to mingle with other changes, it becomes social. It picks up accomplices, plausible deniability, and a paper trail of “it worked on my machine.” Early failures don’t just save time; they protect trust within a team, because they keep accountability clear and blame diffuse.

Context matters: de Icaza comes out of the open-source and tooling world, where software is a living organism with many caretakers. In that ecosystem, tests aren’t just for correctness; they’re governance. They encode expectations in a form that can survive turnover, ego, and imperfect documentation. The quote’s quiet insistence also pushes back against the heroic mythology of debugging - the lone genius hunting a phantom bug at 2 a.m. Instead, it champions a less glamorous ideal: build systems that make drama unnecessary.