ACI-023: The Recovery Protocol

Thesis

Agentic codebases accumulate structural violations through feature-driven local optimization -- the agent solves whatever is in front of it without checking whether the solution already exists elsewhere. Recovery from this accumulated debt requires a forensic component-by-component audit with prioritized remediation phases, not incremental fixes. Piecemeal cleanup produces more violations than it resolves.

Story

Lamplight is an Elixir umbrella application with 5 apps, 734 files, and 126,000 lines of code. Over 7 months and 96 completed steel threads, the codebase had been built almost entirely through agentic development. Features shipped. Tests passed. Velocity was high.