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Be deliberate about when to use the async keyword and await expressions. Making a function async changes its behavior - it will always return a Promise, even for early returns. This can break conditional logic that checks for synchronous vs asynchronous behavior.

Consider these patterns:

• Use async only when you actually need to await something
• For functions with early returns that should be synchronous, return Promise.all() or similar constructs directly instead of using async/await
• Remove unnecessary await keywords that don’t add value

Example from the codebase:

// Avoid: Always returns Promise due to async, breaks early return logic
const executeHead = async () => {
  if (!match) {
    return // Still returns Promise<undefined>
  }
  // ... rest of function
}

// Prefer: Early returns are synchronous, later returns are Promise
const executeHead = () => {
  if (!match) {
    return // Returns undefined directly
  }
  return Promise.all([
    // async operations here
  ])
}

This approach preserves the ability to use patterns like if('then' in result) to detect whether a function returned a Promise or a synchronous value.