Standards across teams

Engineers and scientists all have their own good reasons for writing code the way they do. Some care about ease of prototyping and experimenting, others about maintenance and readability. Many promote the use of libraries and frameworks that worked for them in the past, avoiding tools that have bitten them before.

For code that spans multiple teams, it's crucial to come up with standards that everyone can live with, and to document them carefully. Especially for things such as shared data types, common libraries, integration with platform or OS services, or anything that goes over the network.

An agent, if not told otherwise, copies whichever convention is nearest to the file it is editing. So the questions that stayed out of the document get answered again, per file, at machine speed, increasing the drift over time.

I look for the smallest set of things that has to be common. In practice that is often a set of shared libraries and data types. A style guide comes later, if at all. At Line5 that meant moving the common library into one place and replacing ad-hoc structures with typed ones, down to typed physical quantities so the navigation math could not mix units.