Example Concept: Surface codes are a popular choice for QEC in near-term devices due to their ability to handle local noise and their scalability with two-dimensional qubit layouts. These codes use a lattice of qubits where logical qubits are encoded across multiple physical qubits, allowing for error detection and correction through stabilizer measurements. The key to optimizing QEC is to minimize the overhead in qubit count and operations while maximizing the fidelity of error detection, often by tailoring the code to the specific noise model of the device.