I'm going to sound like a very grumpy old man—because that's what I am—but if you actually need a tool like poetry, you've really fucked up.<p>I have a ton of respect for the author. It's really good code and solves a hard problem in elegant ways. But it's a problem that we shouldn't let ourselves have.<p>It's like a patient talking to a therapist:<p>patient: I'm really depressed.<p>therapist: Why do you think that is?<p>p: Well, I've been having an affair with this woman, and my wife found out about it.<p>t: How does she feel about that?<p>p: She's pretty angry at me. It's affecting our relationship.<p>t: How is it affecting your relationship?<p>p: Well, she doesn't want to have sex with me anymore, and things have gotten a little weird with the kids.<p>t: How do you feel about not having sex with your wife?<p>p: It's depressing.<p>t: And the kids? How do you feel about them?<p>p: They'll grow up and understand eventually.<p>t: Here's a pill you can take every day that will make you feel better.<p>There are two ways to address this kind of situation. The first way is to give the patient a pill to fix the symptom of depression. The second way is to fix the behavior that's causing the depression.<p>Poetry (and Cargo and other package/dependency managers) are a little pill you can take to make you feel better about stuff.<p>But there's another school of therapy. I'm maybe going to sound a little like Zed Shaw here, but there's the "Don't fucking do that" school of therapy.<p>It's possible to fix the underlying behavior that's causing the pain instead of taking a pill. It's harder and requires more work, sure. But in the long term it is a better, more stable solution.<p>Since I'm already on a bit of a rant, I'll go ahead and say it out loud: agile is the source of many of these types of problems. You start out with good intentions and then one day you end up married to a thing that was only supposed to be a proof-of-concept, but it got shipped because product team and velocity, and now your life is hell, and that POC now has kids, and you're legally responsible for them, and fuck it, just give me a pill, doctor.<p>Poetry is a brilliant solution to a problem we shouldn't create for ourselves.