A codex of engineering laws — each with its counter-force, a field guideline, and a source.
English • 日本語
In a world of increasing complexity, the primary bottleneck in engineering is no longer code, but decision-making under uncertainty.
Hammurabi is a curated codex of engineering laws drawn from Cognitive Psychology, Safety Engineering, and System Design. Every law is paired with its counter-force (the principle that keeps it from becoming dogma), a field guideline you can apply tomorrow, and a primary source. It is named for the first written code of laws.
| Category | Law | The Core Idea |
|---|---|---|
| Decision | Type 1 vs Type 2 | Reversible vs irreversible doors. |
| Safety | Normalization of Deviance | Don't let anomalies become your new normal. |
| Safety | Swiss Cheese Model | Accidents happen when holes in layers align. |
| Systems | Chesterton's Fence | Understand the 'Why' before you delete. |
| Organization | Hanlon's Razor | Never attribute to malice what is explained by context. |
| Organization | Conway's Law | Your software mirrors your org chart. |
| Cognition | Survivorship Bias | The dead don't write blog posts. |
| Cognition | Dunning-Kruger Effect | The unskilled cannot see they are unskilled. |
| Incentives | The Cobra Effect | Solutions that create worse problems. |
| Safety | Murphy's Law | Anything that can go wrong, will. |
| Systems | Tesler's Law | Complexity is conserved, only relocated. |
| Distributed Systems | CAP Theorem | You can't have consistency and availability under a partition. |
| Organization | Peter Principle | People rise until they reach a role they're bad at. |
| ...and more | Explore the full codex → |
An engraved, editorial companion site renders the full codex as a numbered code of articles (§ 01 onward), framed by a prologue and an epilogue.
cd website
npm install
npm run devVisit http://localhost:3000 to read the codex.
We welcome laws that have a strong basis in Cognitive Science or Engineering History.
- Check the existing codex.
- Ensure your proposal follows the Concept / Mechanism / Counter / Guideline / Source structure. The
Sourceline must cite the original author, paper, or book — not a blog post that summarizes one. - Add the entry to both
content/en.mdandtranslations/jp.md, then append the short form (title / tag / mechanism / counter / guideline / source) to theenandjparrays inwebsite/src/translations/index.ts. - Open a PR.
MIT © 2026 Hammurabi.