coding-guidelines

To reduce coding mistakes during refactoring and code review, apply behavioral guardrails like think-before-code, simplicity-first, and surgical changes to surface assumptions and limit modifications to necessary, clearly scoped adjustments.

Enforcing surgical changes involves modifying only what is necessary to preserve existing behavior, limiting scope to minimal verifiable modifications, and biasing toward caution over speed to reduce common coding errors during implementation.

Think-before-code prompts help surface assumptions and tradeoffs by enforcing a pause to evaluate implementation decisions before writing code, ensuring caution over speed and reducing errors during development tasks.

Use simplicity-first guidelines during implementation, code reviews, and refactoring to limit changes to what is necessary and clearly scoped, ensuring minimal verifiable modifications that reduce common LLM coding mistakes.

Yes, you can apply these coding guidelines to trivial implementation tasks, though they bias toward caution over speed, so you should use your own judgment to determine the necessary level of guardrails for minor changes.