Fun! I was just reading about the star tracker in "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed". Really fascinating when you're thinking about how this all happened in the 50's and 60's.
Running the same codebase for 10+ years with a small team is what finally made me fully internalize these rules.
I've always been a KISS/DRY person but over a decade there are plenty of moments where you're tempted to reach for a fancier database or rewrite something in a trendier stack. What's actually kept things running well at scale is boring, known technologies and only optimizing in the places where it actually matters.
I'm working on Chief [1], a CLI that autonomously works through a PRD using AI coding agents like Claude Code.
You write user stories, start it up, and it loops through them one at a time. Fresh context per story, progress tracked in markdown between iterations. One clean commit per completed story. Has a TUI for watching it work and supports running multiple PRDs in parallel via git worktrees.
Built it because a lot of the "autonomous coding" tooling out there felt overly complex and opaque. Chief is intentionally lightweight and transparent. Everything is just markdown files and git. No magic.