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AI Coding-Agent Cleanup Is Becoming a Governance Problem
The proposal recommends separating durable project instructions, specifications, decisions, active plans, tests and temporary work—while keeping their responsibilities clear. An earlier cleanup remains blocked: the analysis says host acceptance is unfinished and some checks have summaries but no original run records.
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Key takeaways
- The proposal recommends separating durable project instructions, specifications, decisions, active plans, tests and temporary work—while keeping their responsibilities clear.
- An earlier cleanup remains blocked: the analysis says host acceptance is unfinished and some checks have summaries but no original run records.
- The recommended approach is a staged migration with a thin adapter for each coding agent host, not a sweeping relocation or deletion.
- Cline’s Plan and Act modes describe different workflows, but their existence alone does not establish how a particular installation handles permissions or automatically loads project rules.
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A routine repository tidy-up can become risky when AI coding agents rely on the very files being moved. A new governance proposal takes that problem as its starting point: before reorganizing instructions, tests and project records, establish what is still active, what has actually been verified and what must not be lost.
The proposal is specific to one software repository—not an industry standard or a report of a completed migration. Its central recommendation is to separate responsibilities, then move assets in stages. It explicitly says the earlier cleanup remains blocked: host acceptance is unfinished, and some local checks are recorded only as historical summaries rather than original run receipts. Freezing the old work, the analysis says, should not be mistaken for completing it.
Put the handoff before the cleanup
The suggested design has one stable project entry point that points readers to domain specifications, architecture decisions, the active plan, historical plans, analysis and tests. Temporary work and persistent verification evidence would have separate roles, too. These are proposed destinations and boundaries, not files the report says have already been created or moved.
That distinction matters because an apparently obsolete file might still hold an unfinished obligation, a unique test result or a path another tool expects. The proposal calls for preserving the old plan and its unresolved work before handing the default entry point to a new plan. If preservation fails, or the source changes during the handoff, the recommendation is to stop and keep the existing entry point.
The same caution applies to tests. The proposal rejects file-count targets and rules such as “one test file per source file” as measures of quality. Tests should be reorganized only if their assertions, discovery and execution remain intact. In Go, for example, tests that need access to unexported members may need to stay in the same package; moving them for tidiness could break that access or encourage weakening the test.
One project contract, with host-specific adapters
The proposal favors a single authoritative set of project instructions, with lightweight adapters for the coding-agent tools that use them. That avoids maintaining multiple copies of the same project context. But a file existing in a repository does not prove that an agent has loaded it, and a static configuration check does not prove how a host behaves at runtime.
Cline’s documentation describes Plan mode as a space to explore and strategize without changing files, and Act mode as the mode that carries out work against a plan. 2 The proposal treats that distinction as useful context—not as proof that a particular installed version has specific permission controls, automatic rule loading or document-saving behavior. Those details need to be checked against the target version and tested in the actual host.
That measured approach is consistent with Geoffrey Huntley’s published guidance to make feedback project-specific: tests, type checks, linting and builds can reject unacceptable work, while project instructions can state the commands that apply to that codebase. 6 His separate account of compressing tests into specifications is about cross-language porting; the proposal does not treat it as a reason to discard ordinary regression tests.
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What the proposal does—and does not—settle
The analysis recommends a staged path: preserve the blocked plan first, adapt the relevant contracts and checks before changing paths, test any host-specific bridge separately, and migrate documents or tests only with an itemized scope and recovery plan. Real host acceptance remains a separate gate, as do decisions about accepting a new architecture proposal or declaring the old work complete.
For now, the design is a proposal, not evidence that the migration works. The target host versions, automatic loading behavior, runtime permissions and missing original check receipts remain unresolved. The practical takeaway is deliberately modest: treat repository cleanup as a change to a working system, and require evidence at each handoff instead of assuming that fewer files mean a safer setup.
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What is the short answer to "AI Coding-Agent Cleanup Is Becoming a Governance Problem"?
The proposal recommends separating durable project instructions, specifications, decisions, active plans, tests and temporary work—while keeping their responsibilities clear.
What are the key points to validate first?
The proposal recommends separating durable project instructions, specifications, decisions, active plans, tests and temporary work—while keeping their responsibilities clear. An earlier cleanup remains blocked: the analysis says host acceptance is unfinished and some checks have summaries but no original run records.
What should I do next in practice?
The recommended approach is a staged migration with a thin adapter for each coding agent host, not a sweeping relocation or deletion.