Why I went back to plain text

I keep a small log of decisions in a text file. Not architectural — just small ones. "Picked X over Y because Z." Future me reads it more than I thought he would.

Caches solve a problem and create three new ones: invalidation, observability, and the slow drift between what the cache thinks is true and what the source thinks is true.

If a config file has more than a dozen options, half of them aren't being used. The other half are being used in ways the original author didn't predict.

I trust monorepos more in the second year than I did in the first. Most of the early friction goes away once the tooling catches up.

Most retry logic I've removed turned out to be hiding a real bug. The retries made the failure invisible, and the bug compounded for months in the background.