Three Rules I Earned the Expensive Way

· 1 min read

After nearly a thousand hours building with Claude Code, I’ve learned a few lessons the expensive way. Here are my three non-negotiable rules for every AI coding agent.

1. No fallbacks.

We can’t fix what we don’t know is broken.

Silent failures equal hours of debugging and second-guessing your own sanity.

2. Be frugal.

No looped API calls. Efficiency isn’t optional. It’s respect for both compute and time.

I once spent hours begging Google support for a refund after a runaway $920 Places API bill. Got most of it back. Never forgot the pain.

3. Document the whys.

Code explains what it does.

Documentation explains why.

And if you’ll ever touch it again, document the how.

These aren’t theories. They’re scars.

AI doesn’t replace discipline. It magnifies it.

Whatever habits you bring into the build, it’ll scale them. For better or worse.