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Governance Policy Architecture

Overview

The Archon Platform operates under a set of lightweight governance policies that make AI-assisted infrastructure changes auditable, traceable, and safe. These policies are architectural decisions -- they affect tooling choices, workflow constraints, and documentation conventions across all platform work.

WI-First Branching Discipline

Every code change begins with a work item. Branches are named after work items; the work item is created before the branch. This convention ensures that every change has a traceable audit record in the ADO board, and that AI-assisted development sessions do not produce orphaned commits.

The branch naming policy and its rationale are documented in GOV-0001.

ADO Board as Single Source of Truth

The Azure DevOps board is the authoritative record of all platform work -- planned, in-progress, and done. Work is not tracked in side channels (chat threads, local notes, external trackers). When a task is complete, the work item is updated; when a decision is made, it is either an ADR or a wiki page, linked from the work item.

The ADO project consolidation and board structure are documented in GOV-0002 and GOV-0003.

Session Traceability for LLM-Assisted Operations

When AI assistants (Claude Code, k8sgpt) participate in infrastructure changes, session traceability becomes a compliance concern. The platform convention requires that AI-assisted sessions produce commit messages that reference the originating work item, and that significant decisions made during a session are either committed as ADRs or recorded in ADO before the session closes.

This convention protects against AI hallucination artifacts landing silently in the codebase. See GOV-0004.

Public Naming Convention

Platform-facing names -- hostnames, device identifiers, service names -- follow a public-safe naming convention. Internal cluster numbers, zone codes, and node roles are encoded in structured identifiers that are descriptive but do not expose operational topology to external observers.

The naming convention is documented in GOV-0005.

Key Properties

  • Every change has a traceable work item before code is written
  • ADO board is the only authoritative task tracker
  • AI-assisted sessions are held to the same traceability standard as human sessions
  • Public-facing names follow a convention that is descriptive without being operationally revealing