A lot of recipes (yours truly included sometimes) tell you when to add your spices and only mention them once. And sometimes that's for a good reason. Tempering, for instance, relies on late addition and quick heating. If you add your tempering too soon in the process, you might as well not have tempered; you could just as easily have added the spices to oil at the beginning and started from that base, and indeed many recipes tell you to do that instead.
The thing is, as you become more comfortable with spices (and this is why it's important to become more comfortable with spices) you'll learn what adding them at different points does for the flavor. Some spices shouldn't be added right at the end because they're too intense, but you can temper them first. Some spices should only be added at the end because otherwise you'll lose all their flavor by heating them. But a lot of spices live in a middle ground, where they taste different depending on how long you cook them, and sometimes you'll want all the different flavors a spice can provide.
So I'm suggesting that, if a recipe calls for a certain amount of spice, you can add it throughout the cooking process if you want to get the full depth of flavor. Add some at the beginning, to form the base. Add some in the middle, to give the middle notes. And then add some toward the end, depending on how intense you want that final flavor.
Salt, sugar, and acid (either citrus or vinegar, usually) are the same way; if you add all the salt in a recipe at the end, chances are that it will just taste salty. But if you don't add some salt at the end, you may end up with an under-seasoned dish. Sugar added at the beginning gives a subtler sweetness and aids caramelization, but you may sometimes want to add some at the end to balance flavors or to do something more assertively sweet, like sweet and sour. Acid added at the beginning basically just makes the finished dish sour, so most recipes call for adding it toward the end, but that may be too assertive.
By adding flavor throughout the cooking process, you control the various notes of a spice, and you ensure that the dish is fully flavored, not just coated in flavoring. If you find some spices too much for you but don't want to leave them out in case the recipe turns out too different, try adding them at the beginning when you sauté the aromatics. That will cause their flavors to mellow and recede into the background. Then you can add a very small amount at the end to bring out just a hint of the intense flavor.
A few caveats:
Powdered spices usually should be added with enough time to cook the rawness out of them. If you're adding at the end, try a slow temper (a fast temper will often burn them too quickly) or add with five or more minutes left, otherwise the final dish may turn out a little grainy.
Lemon juice loses its lemon flavor almost immediately when cooked, so you'll either want to add a final splash of lemon to the end or use zest to give the flavor while the juice gives the acidity.
Acidic things sometimes shouldn't be added too early in the dish because they'll throw off the chemistry. Bean skins toughen in acidic cooking environments, and meat when marinated in acidic ingredients starts to denature and become mushy. If you find that the final product is too sharp if you add the acid at the end, you should just use less of it. If it's a flavor component, add in a little sugar to counteract some of the acidity, or in the case of citrus try using some zest instead of juice; zest contains the flavor oils without the acid.
Hot peppers are usually made milder by heat, but this isn't usually true of hot sauce because the peppers have already been cooked (either by heat or by the acid in the mixture). If you add dried peppers to the beginning of a recipe, you may find you need to add more at the end to achieve the level of heat you're looking for. The best way to do that is either by tempering them or by the addition of a neutral hot sauce, one which doesn't contain any additional ingredients besides peppers and salt. Tempering locks the oil-soluble compounds in the oil you use to temper, some of which are the compounds that taste hot. You can certainly use a hot sauce which would go with the dish as well. A vinegar-forward hot sauce will add some acidity, so keep that in mind.
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