principle-minimize-reader-load

Count two things: layers of indirection between a question and its answer, and hidden mutable state the reader must track. Collapse wrappers with one caller, inline pass-through layers, and shrink state scope from globals toward locals and pure functions.

Reader load is the work a person must do to understand code, measured on two independent axes: indirection layers to trace and state to hold in memory. It matters more than proxies like LOC or cyclomatic complexity because code is read far more than written.

Collapse a layer when it has only one caller, repeats the same methods and arguments as the layer below, or was built for a future that never arrived. A layer must change the abstraction or hide meaningful decisions to earn its keep.

Prefer pure functions that return values over mutations, locals over fields, fields over module state, and module state over globals. Derive values instead of synchronizing copies, and name invariants once at the boundary rather than in every consumer.

Metrics like LOC and cyclomatic complexity are proxies that miss the actual cost of understanding code. A flat file with 50 globals can be as hard to reason about as a six-layer adapter stack, so both layers and state must be evaluated independently.