Most Coding Advice Is Wrong — Here’s Why

If Coding Advice Worked, We’d Have Fewer Bad Codebases.
 

The internet is full of coding advice.

“Always do X.”
“Never do Y.”
“Best practices you must follow.”
“Clean code rules every developer should know.”

And yet…

• Codebases are fragile

• Bugs keep repeating

• Projects slow down as they grow

• Developers feel stuck despite “doing everything right”

So here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Most coding advice is not wrong because it’s false.
It’s wrong because it’s incomplete.

Why Coding Advice Sounds Right but Fails in Reality

Most popular coding advice has three problems:

1. It Ignores Context

Advice is often given as absolute rules, while software lives in trade-offs.

What works for:

• A side project

• A tutorial

• A startup MVP

Can break horribly in:

• Large teams

• Long-lived systems

• High-traffic applications

Context decides correctness — not rules.

2. It Optimizes for Teaching, Not Reality

Advice is simplified to be teachable:

• Short examples

• Clean scenarios

• No legacy constraints

• No deadlines

• No business pressure

Real systems are messy.

Advice that works only in ideal conditions is theoretical, not practical.

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3. It Confuses Patterns with Laws

Patterns are tools, not commandments.

But advice turns them into dogma:

• “Always use microservices”

• “Never repeat code”

• “Always abstract early”

Engineering is about judgment, not obedience.

The Hidden Cost of Blindly Following Advice

When developers follow advice without thinking:

• They cargo-cult patterns

• They add unnecessary abstractions

• They optimize prematurely

• They fear breaking “rules”

• They stop reasoning independently

The result?

Code that looks “correct” but behaves poorly.

Examples of Commonly Wrong (or Misused) Advice

❌ “DRY at All Costs”

Duplication is sometimes cheaper than coupling.

Removing duplication too early often creates:

• Hard-to-change abstractions

• Shared code nobody fully understands

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❌ “Premature Optimization Is Evil”

Ignoring performance completely is also a mistake.

Good engineers:

• Design with performance in mind

• Measure before optimizing

• Avoid architectures that block scaling

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❌ “Use the Latest Framework”

New ≠ better for your problem.

Stability, team skill, ecosystem, and longevity matter more than hype.

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Why Seniors Break Rules (And Juniors Shouldn’t—Yet)

Senior developers break rules consciously.
Junior developers break rules accidentally.

The difference is understanding consequences.

Good advice isn’t about what to do —
It’s about why it exists.

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Better Than Advice: Mental Models

Instead of memorizing rules, engineers use:

• Trade-off analysis

• System thinking

• Failure prediction

• Change tolerance

• Human readability

Mental models scale. Advice doesn’t.

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How to Use Coding Advice the Right Way

Treat advice as:

• A starting hypothesis

• Not a final answer

Always ask:

• What problem was this advice solving?

• Does that problem exist here?

• What does it cost me in this context?

Engineering begins where advice ends.

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Final Thought: Advice Doesn’t Write Software — Engineers Do

Bad software isn’t caused by ignoring advice.
It’s caused by following advice without thinking.

The goal isn’t to write rule-compliant code.
The goal is to build systems that survive change.