BEST PRACTICES

"Follow best practices."

The phrase appears in every code review, every architecture document, every engineering guideline. It sounds responsible. It sounds professional. It is the safe thing to say.

It is also a way to avoid thinking.


WHAT BEST PRACTICES ARE

Best practices are solutions averaged across contexts.

Someone solved a problem in their environment, with their constraints, for their users. It worked. They wrote it up. Others adopted it. It spread. Eventually it became "best practice" — the thing you do because everyone does it.

The averaging is the problem. The original solution fit a specific context. As it spread, the context was stripped away. What remains is a rule without its reasons.


WHAT THEY OPTIMIZE FOR

Best practices optimize for "won't get you fired."

Following best practices is defensible. If something goes wrong, you can point to the standard. You did what everyone does. You were not negligent. You were not reckless. You followed the consensus.

This is risk management, not problem solving.

The goal of best practices is to avoid blame. The goal of engineering is to solve problems well. These are not the same goal.


WHAT THEY PRODUCE

Following best practices produces mediocre solutions reliably.

Mediocre: because the averaged solution fits no specific context well. It is not wrong anywhere. It is not excellent anywhere. It occupies the safe middle.

Reliably: because the variance is low. You will not produce a disaster. You will not produce a breakthrough. You will produce the expected outcome — acceptable, defensible, forgettable.

For some domains this is fine. Regulated industries, safety-critical systems, contexts where consistency matters more than optimization. Best practices exist because they serve a function.

But best practices applied universally become a ceiling, not a floor.


THE ALTERNATIVE

The alternative is not chaos. It is not "ignore all advice." It is reasoning from constraints.

What is the actual problem? What are the actual constraints? What are the tradeoffs? What does this specific context require?

Someone else's solution is information, not instruction. It tells you what worked for them. It does not tell you what will work for you. The transfer requires judgment — understanding which parts apply and which do not.

This is harder than following rules. It requires understanding why the rules exist. It requires accepting responsibility for the outcome rather than deferring to the standard.


THE ORGANIZATIONAL DYNAMIC

Organizations default to best practices because judgment doesn't scale.

If every engineer reasons from first principles, outcomes vary. Some will be excellent. Some will be disasters. Management cannot predict which. The variance is intolerable.

Best practices reduce variance. Everyone does the same thing. Outcomes cluster around the mean. No disasters. No breakthroughs. Predictable, manageable, safe.

This is a rational choice for organizations that fear downside more than they value upside. Most large organizations are in this category.

But it is a choice, not a law. Some large organizations maintain reasoning culture through small teams, direct debate, and hiring for judgment. It requires leadership willing to pay the cost in attention. Difficult, but not impossible.

The cost of the default is invisible: the excellent solutions that were never tried because they deviated from the standard.


THE LINGENIC POSITION

Lingenic does not follow best practices. Lingenic reasons from constraints.

The terminal aesthetic is not a best practice. Most companies choose light, glossy, approachable. The best practice is to look like everyone else. Lingenic chose differently because the reasoning supported a different conclusion.

The monospace math is not a best practice. The best practice is LaTeX or MathML. The industry consensus. Lingenic chose differently because the constraints were different.

The publishing system you are reading this document on is not a best practice. The best practice is a CMS, a database, a deployment pipeline. Lingenic chose to make its own filesystem because the constraints favored simplicity.

Each choice is defensible — not because a standard endorses it, but because the reasoning is explicit. Here is what we considered. Here is why we chose this. Here is the tradeoff we accepted.

That transparency is the replacement for best practices. Not "we followed the standard" but "we understood the problem and made a decision."


THE TEST

The test of a best practice: can you explain why it's correct for your context?

If yes, it's not a best practice you're following. It's a reasoned decision that happens to align with common practice.

If no — if you chose it because it's what everyone does — you have outsourced your judgment. The solution may still work. But you won't know why, and you won't know when to deviate.

Best practices are training wheels. At some point you either learn to ride or you stay slow forever.


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Lingenic LLC
2026
