Architecture Intent
Strategic Vision
- What we are building: An Architecture Intelligence Platform that bridges the gap between business intent, architectural decisions, and code implementation.
- Why it exists: To transform architecture governance from a periodic review activity into a continuous, operationalized capability that prevents structural drift and ensures end-to-end traceability.
Project Context
primary_context: ideas-to-life-cas aw_count: 14 alignment_findings: 2
Current State Alignment
The system is currently 'partially aligned'. While the vision is clear, there is a significant governance bottleneck (13 proposed items vs 1 accepted) and a critical provenance gap regarding the Core Orchestration Pipeline.
Focus Areas / Roadmap
- Immediate: Stabilize the baseline by accepting the Core Orchestration Pipeline ADR and reconciling the Architecture Work Registry.
- Short-term: Implement automated CI validation for skill enforcement and align AEM generation logic with decision status rules.
- Medium-term: Operationalize ReasoningOps and GovernanceOps loops to handle the proposal backlog.
- Long-term: Integrate business intent signals and deploy the Code Intelligence layer for automated drift detection.
Gaps & Tensions (Risks)
- Governance Throughput: High volume of proposed architecture work items indicates a bottleneck in the 'Architect Decides' phase.
- Provenance Gap: The Core Orchestration Pipeline is operational but lacks a finalized, accepted ADR, creating a foundation of 'implicit' architecture.
- Registry Authority Drift: Inconsistencies between the authoritative Architecture Work Registry and derived AEM summary views.
- Lifecycle Misalignment: Evolution Map stages (NEXT/DONE) are being assigned to items before their underlying decisions are formally accepted.
Principles
- Registry Authority: The Architecture Work Registry is the single authoritative source for all planning and state.
- Decision-Driven Evolution: No system evolution occurs without a corresponding accepted decision (ADR).
- Operational Participation: Governance must participate in the delivery flow (Prevent -> Detect -> Feedback).
- Traceability over Abstraction: Every architectural insight must be linked to business, code, or decision evidence.
- Human-in-the-Loop: Automation proposes and detects, but architects remain the authoritative deciders.
Emergent Heuristics
Governance_Saturation_Alert: If the ratio of proposed to accepted items exceeds 5:1, prioritize a governance review session over new discovery work. Drift_Correction_Priority: Reconciling the authoritative registry takes precedence over generating new architectural intent when drift is detected. Provenance_Enforcement: An item cannot move to 'NEXT' in the evolution map until its ADR status is 'accepted'.