Keep it Standard, Stupid

For the agentic age I’m overloading the KISS programming tenet with ‘Keep it STANDARD, Stupid’. I’ve long been a proponent of being aggressively vanilla🍦. No, I’m not a Coldplay fan – I’m talking about software projects.

Lean in hard to your chosen framework

Avoid the urge to go off-piste on a whim because you “know better than the framework developers”. We’ve all been there and spoiler: you almost certainly don’t. Nice boring standard makes life much easier for new colleagues to hit the ground running, reduces maintenance burden and has much better interoperability with 3rd party packages and tools you might like to leverage. Your upgrade paths are also likely be way less toe-curling.

Don't misunderstand me; I'm not advocating for being basic. Lean in hard to your chosen framework and become a power-user. Take time to read the docs (you remember those right), build knowledge of advanced features and use its built-in customisation patterns. Just beware hubris convincing you its necessary to crowbar in that latest design pattern you learned.

Agents will happily turn that 10X development 😉 into 10X technical debt

In the age of AI being aggressively vanilla is doubly important with your digital pair-programmer fire-hosing code into your project. They’ll happily use your weird customisations as guidelines turning that “10X development” 😉 into “10X technical debt”. In my experience you’ll also get far more idiomatic results in fewer iterations, making development a whole lot more productive and enjoyable 💜.