The most useful thing you can do for your coding agent is not a better prompt or a smarter model. It's a more boring codebase.
This sounds like a joke. It is not.
What "boring" means
Boring code is not bad code. Boring code is code that does exactly what every other piece of code in the same situation does. It uses the same patterns, the same naming, the same error handling, the same file structure. When you have read one module, you have roughly read them all. There are no surprises, no special cases, no clever shortcuts that only the original author understood.
Boring code is what you get when a team commits to a small number of conventions and refuses to deviate from them. It is the opposite of "every engineer expressing themselves." It is engineering as a coordinated activity rather than a series of individual performances.
