Developer Guidelines

The ainsley.dev Developer Guidelines provide coding standards, patterns, and best practices for developers and AI agents working on ainsley.dev projects. They are designed to ensure consistency, maintainability, and quality across all codebases, public or private.

Purpose

These guidelines serve multiple functions:

• Consistency: Write common habits and conventions in projects.
• Quality: Promote best practices that lead to testable, maintainable code.
• Onboarding: Help new developers and AI agents learn our coding standards.
• Collaboration: Develop a shared vocabulary for technical conversation and code review.

Guiding Principles

Across all languages and frameworks, we follow these core principles:

• Clarity over cleverness: Write code that is easy to understand and maintain.
• Boring is good: Predictability wins over magic.
• Test your code: Write tests that verify behaviour, not implementation details.
• Document intent: Comment on the “why”, not the “what”.
• Use British English: All content and comments use British spellings.
• Review before committing: Run linting, formatting, and tests before pushing code.

Contributing

These guidelines are based on patterns observed in our codebases, including:

• webkit - Go CLI tool for web project scaffolding

If you notice patterns or practices that should be documented, or if guidelines need clarification, please contribute by updating the relevant sections.