In the project I am currently working on I have a lot of code to write. It's a green field project delivering a new platform and I have no frameworks to borrow from or extend. So I have to write the code for each single feature by hand.

I am not complaining. I like writing code. But it takes time, especially since it's only me on the project at the moment.

Thankfully it's all written in Python so it's not to verbose, though even Python is verbose when you have to write this amount of repetitive code.

Which is how we come to the value of clean code. The code is slowly transforming by transformations. The effect of this is that there is no repetition in production code, it is completely DRY. In tests there is little repetition, this to make the tests document the production code.

The effect of this is that although the upfront cost, before any abstractions had been created, was slightly higher the cost of adding new features now is very small. To create a function that initially required 40 lines of code excluding tests now requires 5 to 10 lines. The test abstractions are so easy to use that it takes next to no time even though some repetition (sequentially calling the same methods in each test method to explain the steps required to use the function) is needed.

The conclusion to this is that the returns of clean code is rather immediate. Many seems to think that the returns are slow and far in the future. I know this to be the opposite. The returns are almost immediate and are currently cutting development time radically. And that is on a code base which has only a couple of thousand lines of production code.