Shaped by experience, not borrowed from Twitter. Updated as I learn.
You need proxies for knowing when you've written good code. One is testability — if it's hard to test, it's too tangled. But the one I keep coming back to is deletability. Imagine a feature is no longer needed. How easy is it to rip out? If it comes out clean, you architected it well.
I fell in love with the web building small sites for my friends. No gatekeepers — just put something out there. View source taught me everything. Now the web's tooling is so far ahead of every other platform that I can't imagine working anywhere else.
I'm deep into stacked PRs with Graphite. Tiny, focused changes that are easy to review, easy to revert, and easy to understand. The overhead of a small PR is almost nothing. The overhead of a big one compounds in ways you don't see until review time.
It's tempting to chase every new AI editor, every trending coding tool on Twitter. I'm actively resisting that. Whether it's Cursor, Claude Code, or something else — pick one, learn it deeply, tune it to your workflow. That's what actually makes you better.
I used to champion pair programming at previous companies. AI agents have filled that role — bouncing ideas, writing code together, having a conversation about the problem. I sometimes miss the human side, but the productivity is real.