A failing check gets fixed the same day. A check that passes while doing nothing can bill you every push for months, because a green tick looks exactly like success.
Run two automated agents against the same working directory and one will quietly commit the other's half-finished files. The fix is one working tree per line of work, not more discipline.
A new virtual environment reports that Playwright is missing, so the reflex is to run the installer and watch 150 MB of Chromium download again. It almost never needs to. The browser you already have is a machine-level asset, and the new project can borrow it.
A step-by-step debugging story. The bug took an hour to corner and one line to fix — and the most important move was the diagnostic I ran right before I almost "fixed" the wrong thing.
A continuous-integration bill is not a speed problem. It is a counting problem — and almost every instinct you have about making builds cheaper is aimed at the wrong variable.