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description: drift control, cleanup cadence, and garbage collection for agent-generated systems
alwaysApply: true
---
# 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.

## 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.

## 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- `GOV-12-DRIFT-005` Drift also includes governance/process drift, such as outdated templates, stale instructions, broken cross-links, or review expectations that no longer match actual delivery behavior.

## 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.

## 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.

## 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.

## 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