# Coding Standards

## Author Background

20+ years software engineering, identity/IAM, cybersecurity (endpoint protection and security research), reverse engineering across multiple domains, 25+ years networking and ops.

## Design \& Architecture

Software architecture, design, stack, UX, and UI decisions are all 100% human.

## Code

The code base is about 50% hand-coded and 50% agentic-tool-augmented (Claude Code with typically Opus 4.6 and Fable for these latest features, and a mix of local models for super basic workflow and devops automation). About the same split I employ in all software work I do professionally. Every line of code has been iteratively revised and improved on the fly by myself, and then hand-reviewed again before merging, whether it was generated or not.

This has been a painstaking process, and I'm 1200+ hours deep on Network Optimizer as it looks today, and 1000+ hrs into the R\&D, reverse engineering, and vetting of all of the performance tweaks, security checks, and monitoring tools from my personal stack that have been folded into NO.

Contributors are free to use whatever tools they would like, but I can pretty well sniff out vibe-coded slop vs properly-engineered deliberate solutions. The gap is closing with newer models like Fable, but it's usually pretty obvious for me, and I will not hesitate to tear a PR apart (as friendly as possible) if it has deficiencies.

## Content

This document, my posts and comments on Reddit and in GitHub Issues are 100% human, not even AI-edited or laid-out as I prefer my own voice and style. Tedious stuff like code comments, release notes, and documentation in NO are mostly generated by Opus 4.6 in my voice/style guide and refined by me as needed.

## Quality

I take a lot of pride in all projects and products I code, whether it's down to the pixel-level placement of UI elements in responsive layout, or anal retentiveness about code quality standards. But like any large project, NO has some tech debt, and most of it is documented in the [TODO.md](TODO.md) in the repo or in TODO comments in the code base.

Code should be clean, easy-to-read, and inclusive of useful but not superfluous comments. It should employ good design patterns where appropriate without being over-engineered, and reuse existing common code and styles wherever possible. Rule of thumb, if logic is used more than 2 places, it needs to be in a common utility or otherwise abstracted.