[zubat]

I've cottoned on to the idea of focusing on feedback loops instead of "practices" lately as a way to deal with the kinds of evolutionary changes projects tend to go through.

Practices tend to emerge within a specific project situation as a pragmatic way of addressing concerns. When the practices are communicated across projects a game of telephone is played, the nuances lost, and the meaning is eventually replaced with dogma.

Consider which would be more useful: a workout log that suggests how much additional difficulty you should add each week, or a fixed plan found in a magazine that says that you should be performing an exact workout in each week?

This is the struggle I think programmers really face, because the codebase at any moment in time needs an appropriate "workout plan" to successfully reach the next stage. Sometimes a form of cheat can be used to accelerate it towards a goal, but the concrete progress is reliant on a similar formula to progressive overload cycles.

This focus on feedback also guides healthy cutoffs between prototyping and production solutions: the production solution only makes sense once prototype learning has been done, and the prototype likewise stops making sense when it conflicts with the demands of feedback.