Every SOLID, Clean Code, DRY and so on are all terrible advice sold by a bunch of people who haven’t worked in software development since before Python was invented. Every one of those principles are continently vague so that people like Uncle Bob can claim that you got it wrong when it doesn’t work for you. Uncle Bob is completely correct though, but maybe the reason you many others got it wrong is because the principles are continently vague. Continently because people like Uncle Bob are consultants who are happy to sell your organisation guidance. I think the biggest nail in the coffin of everything from TDD to Clean Architecture should be that they clearly haven’t worked. It’s been more than 20 years and software is more of a mess than if ever was. If all these “best practices” worked, they would have worked by now.

YAGNI is the only principle I’ve seen consistently work. There are no other mantras that work. Abstractions are almost always terrible but even a rule like “if you rewrite it twice” or whatever people come up with aren’t universal. Sometimes you want an abstraction from the beginning, sometimes you never want to abstract. The key is always to keep the cognitive load as low as possible as the author talks about. The same is true for small functions, and I’ve been guilty of this. It’s much worse to have to go through 90 “go to definition” than just read through one long function.

Yet we still teach these bad best practices to young developers under the pretence that it works and that everything else is technical debt. Hah, technical debt doesn’t really exist. If you have to go back and replace part of your Python code with C because it’s become a bottle neck that means you’ve made it. 95% of all software (and this number is angry man yelling at clouds) will never need to scale because it’ll never get more than a few thousand users at best. Even if your software blows up chances are you won’t know where the future bottle necks will be so stop trying to solve them before you run into them.