About

Prickles is a canon of software-craft tenets, written and maintained by Adam Lewis. There are 50 of them across 9 pillars, from foundations like single responsibility and self-documenting code through to the habits that matter most when a coding agent is writing alongside you.

Each tenet on prickles.org carries its origin, the evidence behind it, the strongest objection I could find, and a copy-paste version for your Claude, Cursor, or Copilot rules. The idea is simple. The old engineering principles didn't stop mattering when generation got cheap. They started mattering more, because an agent will produce plausible code far faster than it produces maintainable code, and the difference is the part you still have to own.

This blog is where some of those tenets get the long-form treatment, with the argument worked through in full rather than compressed into a rule. If a post here is useful, the whole canon is at prickles.org.