# Programming Principles That Can Last 20 Years
*2025-10-17 08:45 — Beijing*
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## Core Philosophy
**The overarching idea:** Tools are secondary — **clear problem definition** is the foundation.
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## Human-Centric Code
1. **Tools come second, problems are king**
- Define the problem *first*.
- Choose technology to fit the problem, *not* vice versa.
2. **Code is written for humans to read**
- Use clear names and stable structures.
- Account for both newcomers and your *future self*.
3. **Collaboration beats heroics**
- Communicate openly.
- Share reasoning behind decisions.
- Lead by example: turn followers into collaborators.
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## Architecture & Testing
4. **Divide and couple loosely**
- Apply both **unit tests** and **integration tests**.
- Cover normal cases, boundaries, and extremes.
5. **Don’t tie your identity to code**
- Make code transferable and maintainable.
- Step back to grow beyond current projects.
6. **Security is layered risk control**
- Context matters:
- Banks: **Security first**
- Games: **Performance first**
7. **Code has a lifespan**
- Classify as **core / essential / value-added**.
- Learn to archive and move on.
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## Technical & Cultural Wisdom
8. **Tech debt is like fast food**
- Occasional debt is fine.
- Chronic accumulation is harmful.
9. **Order of trade-offs** *(context-dependent)*
- Security → Usability → Maintainability → Simplicity → Brevity → Performance.
10. **Audit before copy-paste**
- Bugs hide behind complexity.
11. **Document exceptions thoroughly**
- Explain **why**, **how to detect**, and **how to recover**.
- Validate early, fail fast when necessary.
12. **Avoid hype-driven development**
- Stay curious.
- Embrace multilingual/multicultural inputs.
- Keep sharing knowledge.
13. **Don’t design for imaginary problems**
- Extend architecture *only* after real needs appear.
14. **Community makes development fun**
- Listen, inspire, reuse, and give back.
- *Shout-out: Tencent Cloud Developers Community!*
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## AI-Specific Practices
17. **AI is an accelerator**
- Wrong direction = faster crash.
- Set requirements, verify, evaluate before adoption.
18. **Evaluation-driven development (E2E/Eval)**
- Align offline/online metrics.
- Maintain regression sets for models and retrieval chains.
19. **Design controllable uncertainty**
- Adjust `temperature`, `retry`, `timeout`, `cache`, tool-call whitelists.
- Maintain randomness inside boundaries and certainty outside interfaces.
20. **Prefer deterministic methods**
- If a subtask can be solved deterministically, skip "intelligent" guesses.
21. **RAG beats rote memory**
- Prioritize retrievability and updatability of knowledge.
- Let models cite and annotate.
22. **Cost & latency are part of functionality**
- Treat tokens, delays, concurrency as **non-functional requirements**.
23. **Model is a dependency**
- Manage versioning, rollout, rollback.
- Maintain both prompt and system prompt.
24. **Make AI output auditable**
- Require **evidence + steps**.
- Apply programmatic checks where feasible.
25. **If a prompt solves the problem, skip creating a new review meeting.**
26. **Keeping a job is hard; self-improvement has higher ROI**
- Invest in defensive programming for your career.
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## Reflection
**Question:**
If you code by these principles, **can you sustain them for 20 years**?
Drop your thoughts below — *one comment* will be **randomly selected** for a community gift.
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