I worked in a shop that lived by "use your judgement", and it was really the cleanest body of code that I've ever worked in with more than 30 people, in 20 year

I worked in a shop that lived by "use your judgement", and it was really the cleanest body of code that I've ever worked in with more than 30 people, in 20 years of professional coding. Why? Because people with bad judgement were mercilessly brow-beaten into developing better judgement. We had lots of different styles of code hanging around, and you could tell if code had been written by our CTO, our leads, different guys in different teams, etc. The one rule was "write like a chameleon, and make your code look like the code it is in." (okay... to make that work, the other was "spaces, not tabs") The code was generally very readable, and it was a very adult codebase. The problem with hard rules is that comprehensive codification of complete rulesets is fundamentally intractable. You're always going to run into areas that don't fit, or the ruleset will be laughably overwrought (and, thus, impossible to put into practice). You could call it the code-zealot incompleteness theorem... Of course, if I get to make all the rules and have no obligation to be complete, consistent, or considerate, I can get on board with this plan.