What are common Airflow anti-patterns to avoid?

Common pitfalls that hurt reliability and performance:

• Top-level DB calls — calling Variable.get() or Connection.get_connection_from_secrets() at parse time stresses the scheduler.
• Non-idempotent tasks — retries create duplicate data.
• Giant XCom payloads — overloads the metadata DB.
• Too many small tasks — scheduling overhead grows linearly; batch micro-tasks where possible.
• Dynamic DAG generation at parse time — if the generation is slow (API calls, DB queries), the scheduler lags.
• Using SubDAGs — causes deadlocks; use TaskGroups instead.
• Sensors in poke mode for long waits — blocks worker slots; use reschedule mode.
• Hardcoded credentials — always use Connections or secrets backend.

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