Code is a long-term commitment. We choose boring, well-understood foundations and write for the engineer who'll inherit it five years from now — often, ourselves.
Most production systems are read far more often than they are written. The codebases that survive a decade share a recognisable shape: small surface area, predictable structure, dependencies you could explain on a single sheet of paper, and a build that still works after you ignore it for six months.
We treat that shape as the real specification. We pick boring tools — PostgreSQL, Rails, Next.js, plain SQL, plain HTTP — because they have decades of accumulated answers to the questions you haven't thought of yet. We add abstractions only when they earn their weight, and we name them in the language of the business, not the framework of the month.
Where we can, we write the documentation that will let the next engineer, including a future version of ourselves, ship a fix on a Friday afternoon without paging anyone.