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Practices I've stolen, tested, and kept. Take whatever works. Ignore the rest. If one of these is wrong for your situation, it's wrong for your situation — don't argue with the page, argue with your own next commit.
"Tra-la-laaaa!"
When the codebase is in trouble, you don't reach for the cleverest abstraction. You reach for a failing test. Watch it go red. Snap your fingers — Tra-la-laaaa! — write the smallest thing that turns it green. Refactor. Repeat.
The mechanism: a hero only shows up when somebody snaps. Tests only catch regressions if somebody writes them. Be the one who snaps.
Takeaway: red → green → refactor. If you're stuck, write the test first. The test is the snap.
Run models on your own metal whenever the task is small enough to fit. Local LLMs are not always smarter — they are yours. There is a difference between renting intelligence by the token and housing it on a disk next to your dev machine. Have both, but never give up the second.
Frontier models for the hard problems. Local models for the loop — the boring, repeated, all-day work that adds up to a practice you don't have to apologize for.
Takeaway: if a task you do daily can be done by a 7B model on your laptop, move it there. The token bill is not a feature.
Manifestation isn't woo. It's the discipline of naming the thing precisely enough that you'd recognize it if it walked in the room. If you can't write the acceptance criteria, you can't manifest the feature. If you can't write the acceptance criteria for the life, you can't manifest the life. Same engine.
Takeaway: write the outcome down in a single sentence. Read it back tomorrow. If you don't recognize it, sharpen it.
A bug fix is a love letter to the next person who reads the file. A new feature is a debt you may or may not service. When the choice is "fix something already shipped" or "ship something new", fix.
Takeaway: before you start a new feature, look at your open issues. Close one. Then decide.
If you touch a file, leave it cleaner than you found it, or revert. No half-finished refactors. No // TODO: come back to this graveyards. Either commit to the change or commit to the existing shape.
Takeaway: every PR is two PRs: the change you came for, and the cleanup you found on the way. Both ship or neither.
The hardest one, and the one I break most. Some days the right move is: close the laptop, eat real food, read a book, come back tomorrow. The code keeps.
Takeaway: if you can't say why you're shipping it right now, you're shipping for the wrong reason.