Adopt it as-is
Your stack is FastAPI and/or SvelteKit, and you don’t yet hold strong architectural opinions. Chisel gives you a coherent, battle-tested set of them on day one, plus the loop that makes your agent respect them.
Should you use chisel?
Chisel enforces one specific way of building software: FastAPI backends, SvelteKit frontends, layered services, statelessness, shadcn components, one assert per test. The rules are not configurable. Beyond per-line and per-file suppression with a reason, you cannot turn a rule off or tune it. That rigidity is what makes the signal deterministic, and it means chisel is a great fit for some teams and the wrong fit for others.
Fork it and make it yours
You already have opinions, or your stack is different (Django, React, Go, anything not FastAPI + SvelteKit). The bundled rules won’t fit, but the machinery transfers. Be inspired, fork, and encode your own rulebook.
If you have no strong opinions yet
Section titled “If you have no strong opinions yet”Take chisel’s. They are internally consistent, they optimise for the thing that matters in agentic engineering (code that stays readable and evolvable), and the checker never argues about them. You can always develop your own taste later and fork then; starting with no enforced architecture at all is the worst of the options.
If your opinions differ, or your stack does
Section titled “If your opinions differ, or your stack does”Fork it. The value of chisel is not the specific rules; it is the shape of the tool: a deterministic checker, a skill per layer that teaches the pattern, and a JSON contract that points every violation at the skill that explains it. That shape works for any stack.
The codebase is built to be extended: a new rule is one check method in a
service plus one describeRules() entry, and the CLI discovers it
automatically. See Architecture for how
the pieces fit.
Whatever you do, don’t skip the idea itself. Agentic engineering needs a deterministic architecture signal; the only real choice is whether you adopt this one or build your own.
Next: Architecture: the JSON contract and how the checkers are built →