Ask before you build, log as you go

The most expensive mistakes in this build were the ones made without checking first: a placeholder config value that looked harmless locally and broke the real deploy, a project description that quietly drifted out of date while the actual thing kept changing underneath it.

The parts that went cleanest were the ones with a real decision on the table — a markup format, a colour palette, what counts as “real” content, how two features should interleave without one breaking the other — that got a direct question and a direct answer before a line of code got written. Ambiguity resolved early is cheap. Ambiguity discovered late is not.

The other habit that paid for itself all week: keeping a running log of what happened, what got decided and why, and what's still open. Every follow-up session started from the actual state of the project instead of from memory or guesswork. Ten minutes of writing saved hours of re-discovery — it doesn't need to be polished, it needs to be honest and current.