← Patterns / practice
Notice drift, don't fix it in passing
Inconsistencies get reported, not silently cleaned up as a side effect of other work.
- Authors
- Michael Staton
- Augmented with
- Claude Code on Claude Opus 5.5
- Tags
- Drift · Collaboration
What it is
When an agent finds mismatched frontmatter, off-pattern filenames, or a half-adopted convention while doing something else, it notes it and tells the user. It doesn't fix it.
Why
People run several agent sessions at once. A "helpful" cleanup in one collides with real work in another, and nobody asked for it. Conventions here are norms, and consistency comes from focused passes, not ambient tidying.
How
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Mention it once, plainly, with the paths.
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Fix it only when asked, in a pass of its own.
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When a convention changes, old files keep working: readers accept both the old and new spellings.