Best practice, enforced as infrastructure.

01 · Approval comes first

No code until a person approves the plan.

People exercise their authority on the specification, before the work starts. No code is written until the plan is approved, directly or under an epic charter a person approved.

• Stories are checked against INVEST before they can be approved, so size is enforced by the platform.
• Once approved, a specification is locked. Changing it means a new decision, on the record.
• Operators can stop, redirect or give feedback at any point, and what they report is recorded as reported.

Across 22,000 developers, Faros AI finds the most leverage at the authoring stage, before code is written. Faros AI, The Speed Trap, Sept 2026

02 · Rules that hold

Six things an agent cannot do.

An instruction in a prompt is a suggestion, and an agent under pressure will route around it. Arkoria enforces practice at runtime: the tool call is denied before it executes, and the denial is recorded.

Agents can't rewrite their own rules, either: governance changes only happen inside a governed story.

• Hooks run before every file write, shell command, subagent launch and git commit or push. Reads are not gated.
• A gate that needs the hub refuses when the hub can't answer, and says the cause is infrastructure.
• One emergency release covers the core gates: off by default, announced in the session, and recorded as a critical event.

03 · Independent review

The builder never grades its own work.

Before work moves forward, a fresh-context reviewer, the Gate Keeper, evaluates it against your rules and the approved specification. It judges the work itself. Progress is unlocked by its verdict.

• Specifications and plans, code, whole epics and onboarding each have their own review.
• Critical findings block while the work is still open, before anything ships.
• Every verdict is appended to the log with the reviewer named.

46% of developers distrust the accuracy of AI tools' output; 33% trust it. Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey

04 · Proof and lineage

Compliance you can prove.

For every change, the record shows who said yes, what was checked and who checked it, in the order it happened, and nothing in it can be edited afterwards. Nothing reaches Done on an agent's word: before a story can close, the platform checks that the commit is an ancestor of the target branch.

• Approvals come in three authority classes, human consent, observed evidence and independent review, required in order.
• The explanation of what happened is a by-product of the work; nobody writes a report after the fact.
• What an operator reports is logged as reported, never as verified. Credentials are redacted at every surface the record publishes to.

86% of 406 North American infrastructure leaders were confident they could govern AI; 30% had a formal policy. Spacelift, 2026 State of Infrastructure Automation · vendor research · June 2026

05 · Delivery, measured

Quality gets a number.

Delivery metrics are computed from the record, snapshotted daily, each with its definition stated. Drift is scored in four kinds, friction, plan drift, escaped bugs and regressions, each weighted by how late it was caught, and summed into a drift rate across all agents.

• Throughput, cycle time, drift and token cost sit next to the proof behind them.
• Delivery plans use the same data to schedule milestones across agents and project the finish at the current pace.

In METR's 2025 randomized trial, experienced developers believed AI had sped them up by about 20%; measured, their tasks took 19% longer. METR's 2026 follow-up suggests tools have since improved; self-reported productivity still isn't proof. METR, July 2025 · update, Feb 2026

06 · Documentation that stays current

The documentation is updated with every story, and it is yours.

Every story carries its own dossier, exported as Markdown or PDF. The reviewer checks that docs and API contracts changed with the logic. Your code, backlog and documentation are yours.

• Only the documents a change touches are updated, so nothing bloats.
• Generated documentation has to be current before a commit is allowed.

07 · Governance that compounds

Every engagement starts further ahead.

An operator runs a retrospective over recent stories; the platform mines the record, ranks the recurring problems and proposes a fix to the rules, which a person edits and approves (the fifth human decision). Engineering canon carries over unchanged; stack and domain rules are reviewed for each new project.

08 · The platform hunts its own defects

The platform finds its own defects, and never bills for them.

The platform goes looking for defects, regressions and drift. It opens its own bug stories, scores each by how far it got through the gates, and feeds the result back into policy. Bug stories are never billable. Why we price this way.