Agentic Change Governance

Keep agentic coding inside the authority granted by the user, the plan, and the existing system.

Classify Authority Before Editing

Classify each intended change:

• In scope: directly required by the user request or accepted plan.
• Local support: small nearby change needed to make the requested behavior correct.
• Design change: alters architecture, ownership boundaries, public APIs, conventions, storage shape, deployment behavior, or cross-module responsibilities.
• Opportunistic change: cleanup, reorganization, abstraction, renaming, or style churn not required for the requested behavior.

Implement in-scope and necessary local-support changes. Design changes already explicitly approved in the request or plan may proceed; ask only for new or materially changed design decisions. Do not make opportunistic changes unless explicitly requested. A nearby cleanup is local support only when needed for correctness or to make the changed path understandable, not merely because it would be nicer.

Preserve Human-Recognizable Shape

Long-running agentic work must not turn the codebase into a system only the agent understands.