This is a bad analogy. Coding is closer to writing a book than building a house. The faster you start hacking prototypes the better. As long as you are ready to throw virtually all of it away. Most of you assumptions during planning are wrong anyway so there is little point in planning too much.
The worst thing that happened to coding is business culture with design docs, architecture docs, whatever docs all coming before a prototype is written. This is how you end up with "enterprise grade" garbage.
The best way to create a good code base is to write it inside out a few times over. Documents ain't gonna help you.
The API at gitstatusd level is simple.
The ListDir API is also relatively simple. The only complication is to pass in an arena which is not a very high bar.
The worst thing that happened to coding is business culture with design docs, architecture docs, whatever docs all coming before a prototype is written. This is how you end up with "enterprise grade" garbage.
The best way to create a good code base is to write it inside out a few times over. Documents ain't gonna help you.