principle-minimize-reader-load

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Apply when reviewing or shaping code that's hard to trace. Count layers between question and answer, and hidden state in the reader's head; collapse one-caller wrappers and shrink mutable scope.

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Added on2026-05-29

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Minimize Reader Load

Maintainability is the work a reader must do to understand code. Track two axes:

Layers to trace. How many indirections sit between the question and the answer.
State to hold. How much hidden or mutable context the reader must keep in their head.

Why: Code is read far more than it is written. LOC, cyclomatic complexity, and "clean architecture" are proxies. Reader load is the thing that matters. The two axes are independent. A flat file with 50 globals can be as hard to reason about as a 6-layer adapter stack. Guard both. This is the human analog of Guard the Context Window: working memory is finite for readers too.

The pattern:

Collapse layers that do not earn their keep: wrappers with one caller, adapters with no second implementation, indirection introduced for a future that never came. Inline them.
Shrink state scope: prefer pure functions (returns over mutations), locals over fields, fields over module state, and module state over globals. Derive instead of sync.
Name the invariant at the boundary, not in every consumer, so the reader learns it once.
Before adding a layer or a piece of state, ask: does this reduce reader load somewhere else by at least as much?

The test: Can a new reader answer "where does X come from?" and "what can change X?" in under 30 seconds? If not, cut layers or cut state.

principle-minimize-reader-load

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Minimize Reader Load