ACI-037: The Recovery Protocol

Thesis

A codebase built at agent speed accumulates structural violations while its tests stay green, because each change is solved where it stands. Recover with a forensic audit, component by component against named rules, remediated in risk order with a gate after each phase. Then keep the audit as a cadence: re-run it with rules chosen for the scope when cross-cutting work lands, and end each run with a report on the audit itself.

Story

On 4 March 2026 Lamplight, an Elixir platform for interactive narrative worlds, audited itself. The audit thread scoped about 734 files and 126,000 lines across five applications, checked against 15 rules by one sub-agent per component (Lamplight@48a085a09, 2026-03-04). The synthesis counted 389 violations and 13 patterns that crossed components (Lamplight@722cbf4b6, 2026-03-04). The largest class, at 88, was the Highlander rule: helpers copied across more than 40 command modules, and pages near-identical in two web applications. The synthesis named a smaller class the highest-risk systemic pattern: 45 with blocks without an else, the worst offender the model-calling layer with 14, where a model's failure could come back as an unexpected return shape.