Tips (beta)

Short things you learn by losing afternoons. Ours, and whatever people send in.

With your agent

Tell it what not to touch. With no fences it rewrites half your codebase to fix one button.
"It should work" is not "it works".
Do not let it summarise the test run. Ask for the raw command output, exactly as it came out.
Three failed tries in a row are not fixed by a fourth. They are fixed by reframing the problem.
If it hands you code without saying why, you cannot tell whether it chose that or just went first-thing-first.
Have it show the diff before applying it. Accepting blind is exactly the same as not reviewing.
Tell it what the thing is for, not just what you want. An agent that knows the why gets it right far more often.
One task per conversation. Once the thread fills with old attempts, it drags its own mistakes along as if they were facts.
When it says "fixed", go look yourself. That is the sentence that most often turns out to be accidentally false.

If you need a comment to say what a variable holds, the name is the thing that is wrong.
The line that matters in an error is almost never the first one. Read it all before touching anything.
Deleting code is progress.
Do not leave dead code commented out just in case. That is what git is for.
If you cannot explain it out loud, you have not understood it yet.
Code gets read far more often than it gets written. Optimise for whoever reads it.
Before fixing a bug, make it happen on demand. What you cannot trigger, you cannot prove you fixed.
Change one thing, then test. Two at once and you no longer know which one did it.
When something "makes no sense", the bug is almost always yours, not the language's.
A function that needs the word "and" to explain itself is doing two things.

One change, one commit. When something breaks you will want to know which of the seven did it.
The message says why. The what is already in the diff.
git add -p makes you look at what you are staging, chunk by chunk. Never another stray file.
Before a force push, breathe and check which branch you are on.
When something works, commit it. Even half-done. Being able to go back beats a pretty history.
A pushed key is already public, even if you delete the commit. Rotate it, do not hide it.

Finish something ugly before starting something pretty.
Hopping to another language is not progress: it is starting over under a new name.
A tutorial that does not end in something of your own does not count as learning.
If you have been stuck for two hours, the problem is no longer technical. Get up.
Copying is fine. Copying without understanding is what strands you at the next bug.
Pick a project you actually care about. It is the only thing that brings you back on a Tuesday night.
The basics are boring because they work. What shines in a video is rarely what you use every day.

Animate transform and opacity. Anything else forces a relayout every frame, and that is where your 60fps go.
If your text lives inside a little rounded box, ask yourself what the box is doing.
Before picking the palette, check it can be read. A pretty unreadable grey is still unreadable.
Mobile first really means opening it on a phone, not shrinking the desktop window.
If your page needs JavaScript to show a paragraph, something went sideways along the way.
Every font you load is blank time for whoever lands. Two weights are usually enough.