Quiet UIs and loud bugs

Most retry logic I've removed turned out to be hiding a real bug. The retries made the failure invisible, and the bug compounded for months in the background.

I write smaller commits than I used to. The commits are uglier in isolation and much easier to read in sequence.

There's a kind of premature optimization that comes from imagining a future team. "What if someone needs to swap this out?" Often, no one does.