principle-experience-first

# Experience First The product is the experience. Every technical decision either helps or hurts it. When implementation convenience conflicts with user delight, choose delight. - Say no to 1,000 things (every feature, control, and option must earn its place) - Ship less, ship better (polished experience with three features beats rough one with ten) - Prototype before committing (design decisions are cheaper in throwaway HTML than production code) - Sweat the details (transitions, alignment, spacing, feedback, error states) - Tighten the core loop (every feature should serve the central workflow or get out of the way) The user is whoever consumes the work. For a UI that is the end user. For a library or an internal API it is the colleague who imports it. The engineer who maintains the code next is a user too. Weigh their experience the same way, and explain impact from their seat. Foundations should serve the experience, not the other way around. Foundational thinking governs the *sequence* of work; this principle governs the *target*.