Sidecars and the things they hide

When a system surprises me, my first instinct used to be to fix the surprise. Now my first instinct is to figure out which mental model of mine was wrong, and update that.

I split a 4000-line file into 12 smaller ones this week. The smaller files weren't actually easier to understand. The 4000-line file was a problem of structure, not of length.

Every time I revisit a project after six months, I find at least one place where past-me wrote a comment that present-me has now stopped trusting. Comments rot faster than code.

I write smaller commits than I used to. The commits are uglier in isolation and much easier to read in sequence.