Scale-position 5: how I stopped drifting between depth and speed

Every engineering trade-off between "ship faster using the abstraction" and "derive first, build from scratch" is implicitly a position on a 0-to-10 axis. Without codifying the axis and naming where you currently sit, you drift between positions session by session — one day demanding a whiteboard derivation, the next day shipping a library import without looking at it. The drift is invisible inside the session. It only shows up weeks later when the skills you thought you were building turn out t