Common Traps

A named gallery of specific beginner mistakes, each with the fix. Each trap is its own short page — a cautionary tale you can hand to someone about to make the same mistake. Cross-linked to ../../practical/ where topics overlap (licenses, reproducibility, cost).

The gallery

• Committing secrets to git. — the single most common way beginners get burned.
• Blindly running agent-suggested shell commands. — most are fine; once in a while, catastrophic.
• Force-push disasters. — one flag, whole branch gone.
• Letting the agent refactor without review. — a 300-line diff you didn’t read.
• Accepting the first thing that compiles. — “compiles” ≠ “works.”
• Scope-creep prompts. — you asked for one change; you got six.
• Building on sand. — unreliable deps, beta APIs, deprecated models.
• Runaway API bills. — loops, retries, leaks — always set a ceiling.
• Deploying to production without testing. — works-on-my-machine, at scale.
• Trusting a local-running model demo. — a clever trick is not a pipeline.
• “Works on my machine” illusions. — reproducibility is a practice, not a hope.