“Simple made easy” (Rich Hickey) Simple means not entangled; easy means familiar. They are often confused, and choosing easy repeatedly leads to long-term complexity.

“Complexity is the enemy” Reliability, velocity, and correctness all decay as systems become more interwoven. Most engineering work is about keeping complexity from accreting.

“Make it work, make it right, make it fast” (Kent Beck) Optimization before correctness or clarity is premature. Sequence matters.

“Worse is better” (Richard P. Gabriel) Simple, incomplete systems that ship and evolve often beat elegant but over-engineered ones.

“Do one thing well” (Unix philosophy) Small, composable tools scale better than monoliths of intention.

“You aren’t gonna need it” (YAGNI) Speculative features are a primary source of accidental complexity.

“APIs are forever” Early design decisions harden quickly; public interfaces outlive their authors.

“Explicit is better than implicit” (Zen of Python) Hidden behavior saves keystrokes but costs understanding.

“Premature optimization is the root of all evil” (Donald Knuth) Performance work without evidence usually makes code worse.

“Design for deletion” Systems that cannot be easily removed or replaced will eventually dominate you.

“Software is grown, not built” Codebases evolve organically; treating them like static artifacts leads to brittleness.

“Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard”

“Simple made easy” — Simplicity is about lack of entanglement, not lack of features. You can build powerful systems without making them interdependent or fragile.

“Make it work, make it right, make it fast” — Correctness precedes optimization; premature efficiency compounds mistakes.

“Complexity is the enemy” — Every added moving part increases cognitive load, failure surfaces, and long-term cost.

“Worse is better” — Systems that are small, comprehensible, and easy to evolve often outcompete theoretically superior but intricate designs.

“You aren’t gonna need it (YAGNI)” — Build for present requirements; speculative generality is a form of waste.

“Optimize for change” — The most important requirement is the one you haven’t discovered yet.

“Make illegal states unrepresentable” — Encode correctness into structure so whole classes of bugs cannot exist.

“Explicit is better than implicit” — Hidden behavior trades short-term convenience for long-term confusion.

“Do one thing well” — Cohesion beats cleverness; focused components compose better than multipurpose ones.

“Correctness before cleverness” — Readability and invariants outlast ingenuity.

“Choose boring technology” — Reliability, talent availability, and institutional knowledge matter more than novelty.

“Local reasoning” — You should be able to understand a piece of code without loading the entire system into your head.

“Constraints liberate” — Limits force clarity and better design decisions.