I have a lot of ideas. How to bring them to production? Most ideas die along the way as Most ideas are bad. So how to Avoid Waste? Iterate fast in the beginning, take a lot of Technical Dept and transform the code base.

Start fast, get feedback. Your idea gets often killed or changed beyond recognition. Being fast and flexible is key. Focus on feedback. The result is a Proof of Concept. Iterate here until the feedback converges to a sensible feature set.

You know at least the scope of the features and have a rough idea what is actually valuable. Feature-Values follow a power law. You have to select the minimal set of features that form an useful product and add stability to them. Do this as fast as possible and bring it to production. Your project still gets almost certainly killed, so do nothing which is not required right now. Result is a MVP in production, which your users can use and brings them value without further change. If valuable, change requests will come over the lifetime of the project. You have taken a lot of technical dept. The users find your idea valuable. Not it is time to pay it off. You also have the complete project in your head. This will change. Change the code so that you and others can change thing and add features within minutes. Create an project structure and architecture that helps your future self, document it, bring new devs (and your future self) up to speed using a getting-started and installation guide. Give them a magic button that tells them that they didn’t break anything (test coverage & CI). Be pragmatic, you can use an agent to do most of the work, but ensure, that everything in your head goes into the code-repo.

You got a long-living piece of software that is fun to work on and delivers value.