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MORES.DEV

Mos maiorum — the way of the ancestors.

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§2

Mores are the unwritten rules that govern behavior within a community — not laws, which are codified and enforced, but customs, which are absorbed and performed. In software development, mores are the conventions that no README documents: how long a pull request should sit before review, whether you refactor code you did not write, the acceptable ratio of comments to code.

These norms are invisible until violated. A developer who breaks a more discovers its existence in the same moment they discover its force. ████████████████████████████████████

The magnetic monopole operates by similar logic. Its existence is predicted by the deepest symmetries of physics — Maxwell's equations become perfectly symmetric if monopoles exist. Yet no one has found one. The monopole is the ultimate unwritten rule: a principle that should govern reality but has never been observed doing so.

// cf. Durkheim 1893 // v0.0.1-alpha

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§3

3.1 Thou shalt not push to main on Friday afternoon.

3.2 Thou shalt not approve thine own pull request.

3.3 Thou shalt write tests, even when no one is watching.

3.4 Thou shalt not refactor during a hotfix.

3.5 Thou shalt name variables as if the next reader is a sleep-deprived stranger.

3.6 Thou shalt not introduce a dependency for a function thou couldst write in ten lines.

3.7 Thou shalt document the why, never the what.

3.8 Thou shalt treat the codebase as a commons, not a fiefdom.

3.9 Thou shalt not blame the compiler before reading thine own code.

3.10 Thou shalt respond to code review within one working day.

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// reverted // disputed // see also: burnout

§4

When a more is broken, the punishment is not formal but felt. The code reviewer who takes three days. The standup where eyes avoid yours. The PR that receives seventeen nitpick comments when it usually receives two. ████████████████████████████

Dirac's monopole, if found, would carry a magnetic charge of staggering magnitude — at least 68.5 times the electric charge of the electron. ⚠ A single monopole passing through a superconducting loop would produce an unmistakable signal. On February 14, 1982, Cabrera's detector at Stanford recorded exactly such a signal. Once. Never again.

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§5

- Magnetic poles always come in pairs.
+ A single magnetic monopole, if it exists anywhere
+ in the universe, would explain the quantization
+ of electric charge.
  // Dirac, 1931
- Grand unified theories predict monopole
- overabundance in the early universe.
+ Cosmic inflation was proposed partly to dilute
+ the predicted monopole density to undetectable
+ levels.
  // Guth, 1981
- The search has found nothing.
+ The search continues. MoEDAL at CERN scans for
+ the heavy, slow-moving tracks a monopole would
+ leave in matter.

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The most beautiful prediction that nature has not yet confirmed stands at the intersection of quantum mechanics and classical field theory. To search for the monopole is to believe that the universe, at its deepest level, is symmetric — and that the missing pole waits to be found.

mores.dev

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mores.dev

2026-02-25T00:00:00Z

v1.0.0

This document is subject to revision.