Recorded Is Not Enforced

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0200

OpenAI’s account of harness engineering — published in February, already canon — contains a diagram whose caption has become the field’s premise: “What Codex can’t see doesn’t exist.” From the agent’s point of view, anything outside its running context might as well not have been decided.

Five months later, the answers to that premise have piled up, and they contradict each other. One vendor, Mneme, published a three-rung maturity ladder for architecture decision records — ignored, advisory, enforced — and argued that “an ADR a machine checks is a constraint.” The same vendor’s other post argues the opposite direction: rule files loaded into context don’t scale, structured retrieval is the higher form. A consultancy, TechEmpower, declared that the wiki’s future is to be a report generated from the repository. A widely shared post declared AGENTS.md the new ADR, full stop. Thoughtworks put the “context graph” on its radar — decisions and precedents as first-class nodes structured for AI consumption — without connecting it to the lightweight ADRs on the same radar since 2017.

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Recorded Is Not Enforced