Field Notes / AI Engineering Control
Two roadmaps make fresh code feel like legacy
What a repository reveals when the team's real planning horizon is shorter than the official product plan.
Fresh code becomes legacy early when the team does not believe it will own the next change.
First-hand context
The repository showed a second roadmap: decisions were barely recorded, tests were sporadic, and agent instructions lived on individual machines.
Decision record
The decision and its trade-off
The task was not to build for imaginary scale. It was to make the next product change cheap enough to test.
What can be inspected
Specifications, shared agent context, review separation, and short decision records became versioned inputs.
What failed or remains uncertain
The source is a draft with rounded, anonymized observations. They remain review material, not approved results.
Field rule
A reusable principle
A project should own the way its code is produced as well as the code that lands in Git.