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GOV 12 DRIFT CONTROL AND GARBAGE COLLECTION

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Governance: Drift Control and Garbage Collection​

Agent-generated systems accumulate drift unless cleanup is continuous, explicit, and tracked.

Governed repositories should treat cleanup as part of normal delivery rather than a rare rescue phase.

Commentary: Frames cleanup as core delivery maintenance, not optional housekeeping.

Core Principle​

  • GOV-12-DRIFT-001 Drift control is a first-class maintenance loop, not optional housekeeping.
  • GOV-12-DRIFT-002 Small continuous cleanup is preferable to large infrequent cleanup campaigns.
  • GOV-12-DRIFT-003 Human taste and review findings should compound through recurring cleanup and enforcement, not reset every run.

Commentary: Establishes the cadence and leverage model for keeping agent-generated repos healthy.

What Counts as Drift​

  • GOV-12-DRIFT-004 Drift includes stale docs, duplicated local patterns, weak or inconsistent naming, obsolete generated artifacts, lingering temporary files, repeated low-quality agent patterns, and unowned deviations from current standards.
  • GOV-12-DRIFT-005 Drift also includes governance/process drift, such as outdated templates, stale instructions, broken cross-links, or review expectations that no longer match actual delivery behavior.

Commentary: Expands drift beyond code smells to include governance and documentation entropy.

Cleanup Expectations​

  • GOV-12-DRIFT-006 Governed repositories should maintain a recurring cleanup path that inspects for drift and converts meaningful findings into tracked work or immediate bounded cleanup.
  • GOV-12-DRIFT-007 Cleanup work should prefer focused, reviewable corrections over sweeping unfocused rewrites.
  • GOV-12-DRIFT-008 When cleanup is deferred, the drift item should be captured as explicit backlog work rather than left as ambient known mess.
  • GOV-12-DRIFT-009 Repeatedly rediscovered drift should be treated as an enforcement gap, not just a maintenance todo.

Commentary: Requires drift findings to produce action instead of recurring complaints.

Promotion from Cleanup​

  • GOV-12-DRIFT-010 If the same class of cleanup keeps reappearing, the governing system should promote the remedy into stronger controls such as templates, reference docs, tests, generators, or lint rules.
  • GOV-12-DRIFT-011 Cleanup findings should inform quality grading, governance updates, or harness improvements when they reveal systemic weakness.

Commentary: Converts repeated cleanup into stronger system-level prevention.

Reviewability and Evidence​

  • GOV-12-DRIFT-012 Drift cleanup should leave evidence of what pattern was corrected, why it mattered, and what prevents recurrence when known.
  • GOV-12-DRIFT-013 Large cleanup claims without scoped examples, evidence, or recurrence prevention should be treated skeptically.

Commentary: Prevents vague “cleaned up” claims from masking unchanged underlying behavior.

Anti-Patterns​

Avoid these failure modes:

  • saving cleanup for occasional heroics
  • accepting AI slop as inevitable background cost
  • repeatedly fixing the same smell manually without strengthening the harness
  • allowing stale governance/docs/templates to survive because product code changed faster
  • treating repository clutter as harmless when it actively degrades future agent runs

Commentary: Names the quality-debt patterns this rule is designed to stop from compounding.