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What "best practice" did you quietly stop following?

October 5, 2026
By Mika Flowers
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Every dev picks up a pile of rules early on. Write tests first. Never commit to main. Keep functions under 20 lines. DRY everything. Comment your code. 100% coverage or it doesn't count. ![bfmeme](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/y68geh2aufj05uv4q5be.png) Some ...

What "best practice" did you quietly stop following?

Every dev picks up a pile of rules early on. Write tests first. Never commit to main. Keep functions under 20 lines. DRY everything. Comment your code. 100% coverage or it doesn't count.

bfmeme

Some of those rules stuck. Others got quietly dropped somewhere along the way, usually after a project where following them made things worse.

I'm curious about the ones you dropped.

  • What was the rule?
  • What happened that made you stop?
  • What do you do instead now?

Bonus points if you still follow it sometimes and can explain when.

Two small ground rules so this stays useful:

  • be specific (a real situation beats "it depends"), and if you disagree with someone's answer, reply and say why. The arguments in threads like this are usually the best part ๐Ÿ˜„

I'll go first in the comments.