Minimize Reader Load Maintainability is the work a reader must do to understand code. Track two axes: 1. Layers to trace. How many indirections sit between the question and the answer. 2. State to hold. How much hidden or mutable context the reader must keep in their head. Why: Code is read far more than it is written. LOC, cyclomatic complexity, and "clean architecture" are proxies. Reader load is the thing that matters. The two axes are independent. A flat file with 50 globals can be as hard to reason about as a 6-layer adapter stack. Guard both. This is the human analog of Guard the Contex…