Safety-Critical Coding Patterns

Guidelines adapted from NASA's Power of 10 rules for safety-critical software.

When to Apply

Full rigor: Safety-critical systems, financial transactions, data integrity code Selective application: Business logic, API handlers, core algorithms Light touch: Scripts, prototypes, non-critical utilities

"Match rigor to consequence" - The real engineering principle

When NOT To Use

• Ordinary application code, where these defensive checks become the bloat that prefer-invariants-over-fallbacks targets (use conserve:code-quality-principles)

The 10 Rules (Adapted)