code-priority

To prioritize architecture decisions, apply the State > Coupling > Complexity > Code framework, evaluating design options stepwise by statelessness, dependencies, and simplicity before considering code volume. This ensures higher-priority structural concerns guide refactoring over mere code reduction.

The state > coupling > complexity > code framework is a decision hierarchy for refactoring that prioritizes minimizing state, then reducing coupling, then managing complexity, and finally shrinking code volume. It permits tradeoffs, allowing increased coupling if it achieves greater statelessness.

You should increase coupling to improve state management when it makes your code more stateless. The core principle of this design priority framework explicitly accepts trading lower-priority coupling concerns for higher-priority state reduction during architecture reviews.

Yes, the code-priority framework integrates directly with TDD, Tidy First, and targeted refactoring practices. It complements these workflows by providing an explicit priority hierarchy to evaluate design tradeoffs during test-driven development cycles.

The best way to evaluate tradeoffs between dependencies and simplicity is using a stepwise decision framework comparing options on state, coupling, complexity, and code volume. This hierarchy consistently favors reducing dependencies and simplifying logic over minimizing code size.