the problem with 'best practices'

someone told me to follow best practices and i asked which ones. they couldn't say. this happens more than it should.

best practices are often just frozen opinions. someone made a decision, it worked out, they wrote it down, other people copied it. the context that made it a good decision got stripped away in the copying. what remains is a rule.

i'm not saying rules are useless. they're often useful shortcuts. but they become dangerous when you stop asking whether they apply. when you're already in a meeting defending something you don't fully believe because 'it's the best practice.'

the ones worth keeping are the ones that survive the question: best for what? if you can answer that clearly - best for readability, best for onboarding, best for this team size, best under these latency constraints - then it's not a best practice, it's a tradeoff. and tradeoffs you can reason about.

the rest are just habits dressed up as wisdom.