Exploring Software Development Principles: Making Easy Changes Hard as a Thought Experiment

There's a semi-well-known adage in software development that says when you have a hard code change, you should 'first make the hard change easy, and then make the easy change'

In other words, refactor the code (or do whatever else you need to do) to simplify the change you're trying to make before trying to make the change

This is especially good advice if you have a good automated test suite—you can first do your refactor without changing behavior