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Engineering Trade-offs

Senior engineering is mostly choosing well between two good options.

performance vs costsecurity vs convenienceconsistency vs availabilityspeed vs debtbuild vs buymanaged vs self-hostedLLM quality vs cost

Lessons

  1. 37.1Engineering trade-offs: "it depends", on what?Almost every engineering choice gives something up to gain something else. Senior engineers say out loud what, and why. 30 min Trade-off matrix AI cost simulator
  2. 37.2Build vs buy: what should you own?Login, payments, search, email: which parts should your team build, and which should you just buy? 30 min Trade-off matrix
  3. 37.3Managed vs self-hosted: who carries the pager?Pay a provider to run your database, or run it yourself? The real question is who gets woken up at 3 a.m. 30 min Trade-off matrix
  4. 37.4LLM quality vs cost: how much intelligence does each request need?Big AI models are smarter but slower and pricier. Here's how to spend that intelligence only where it pays off. 30 min Trade-off matrix AI cost simulator

On the job: try it on your own project

Pick a technical choice your team is debating, such as building a tool versus buying it, or running a database yourself versus managed. Ask Claude Code to research the options against your real constraints: cost, team skills, security and time. Write a short decision record with the trade-off table, your choice, and what would make you revisit it.

Can you do this now?

0/4. Anything you can't tick yet: reopen that lesson's practice ladder.