Template guardrails stop org slop
“Guarded the template. Not the fork.”
Cause
After three months with mandated project templates, the count of unowned AI-built internal tools rose from 41 to 67; builders forked the template once and never took the updates.
What was tried, what was hit, what it means
The firm's platform team, with the lab advising, mandated a project template for anything built with an AI coding tool: an owner field, a data-classification field, a retention date, and a CI job that failed if any were blank. The hypothesis was that the count of orphaned internal tools would fall within a quarter, because the template made ownership a precondition of existing.
It did not fall. The tools were built, the fields were filled in on day one, and then the template was forked and the fields went stale. Of 67 tools inventoried in June, 51 had a named owner who no longer worked on them, 23 had a retention date already passed, and 9 handled data that the classification field said they did not. The gate was at creation; the slop accumulated after creation. A review board proposed in April would have moved the gate later and, on the platform team's own numbers, added eleven days to every build.
What replaced it is in r-citizen-dev: a paved road with a retention policy that deletes by default, and a monthly sweep that lists everything past its date. Ownership at birth is necessary and not sufficient; the missing piece was a mechanism that acted when the owner stopped.
Lessons
- 01A gate at creation cannot govern a lifecycle; something has to fire when the owner walks away.
- 02Mandated templates get forked once and then diverge; measure the fork, not the template.
- 03Count the artefacts, not the compliance; 67 tools with filled-in fields is still 67 tools.
Record
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