wrote out my dp problems in plain english before touching code and stopped writing solutions that technically worked but I couldn't explain

Used to jump straight to code on DP problems and sometimes get lucky with a working solution I couldn't actually explain if asked. Forcing myself to write the recurrence in a plain sentence first, 'the answer at i depends on the best of these two prior states,' slowed me down but fixed that thing where I pass the test cases and fail the follow-up questions.