Engineering

“Orthogonal work” means changes that are unrelated to the task at hand — they sit on a different axis from what you were asked to do. Example If you are asked to fix a bug in auth, then: On-axis (do it): the bug fix itself, plus tests for that fix. Orthogonal (do not do it): renaming variables in the same file, “cleaning up” a nearby function, updating comments you noticed were stale, deleting code that looks unused, reformatting imports. Why avoid it The orthogonal changes might be improvements, but they: ...