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Enterprise engineering

Answerable to auditors, not only to users: what was done, by what, under which policy, with what evidence.

Enterprise engineering

Who this is

Engineering inside an organisation where a change has to be attributable, a policy has to be demonstrably applied, and somebody outside the team will eventually ask for proof. The introduction of machine authors did not relax any of that; it made the provenance question sharper.

How they work

Under standards they did not all write, with review gates, retention requirements and a periodic obligation to show that the controls are real rather than documented.

What goes wrong

Controls that are written down and not wired to anything. Work whose author, policy and verification cannot be reconstructed six months later. Cost attributed to a department but not to an outcome. Agent activity that leaves transcripts — the worst possible audit artefact: voluminous, unstructured, and not evidence of anything.

22 moments

Every moment that names this one. Derived from the moments; this page keeps no list.

  1. watched the strongest model, at maximum effort, rename a variableCapability, reasoning depth, context size and verbosity collapse into one habit — everything on — because nothing ever named them separately. cost: mediumconstant Why, and what to do →
  2. accepted "done" because the model said so, and paid for it the next morningA fluent completion claim is accepted as evidence because nothing wrote down, beforehand, what would have to be true. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  3. asked what the workers did last night and had only transcripts to grepA conversation log records what was said, not what happened, so the operational question has to be answered by a person reading prose. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  4. read three roadmaps for one project and believed none of themA plan kept in prose is a snapshot, and every copy of it drifts on its own schedule; stored status is an assertion that stays true after the world moves. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  5. watched the always-loaded instruction file grow past a thousand linesEverything important gets appended to the always-loaded file, so every session pays for every rule and reads none of them carefully. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  6. changed a policy in one place and found the old one still in force in three othersA decision is updated at its source and the generated copies keep serving the previous version, with nothing reporting the difference. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  7. found a rule everyone believed was enforced and nothing ever invokedEvery artefact of enforcement exists — the rule, the script, the test — and no path connects them, so the control is fiction. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  8. went looking for why we chose this and found a chat logA decision that was reached in a session is stored where only that session can read it, so it is neither reviewable nor discoverable. cost: highconstant Why, and what to do →
  9. found a substantial change that no issue, ticket or plan ever asked forWork arrives with no bounded contract behind it, so its scope, its acceptance criteria and its ownership are all decided after the fact. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  10. closed an issue whose acceptance criteria nothing had actually checkedCompletion is recorded as a state change in a tracker rather than as evidence in the repository, so the two drift immediately. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  11. was asked how far the milestone had got and had to go and ask four peopleProgress is an aggregate that exists only in people, because the parts it aggregates were never recorded in a form anything can add up. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  12. read a promise in the README that no test stood behindA sentence describing what the software does is written once and never connected to anything that would fail if it stopped being true. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  13. shipped an interface change whose contract document still described the old oneA contract maintained by hand beside the code it describes goes stale on the first change that forgets it. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  14. had a green pipeline over generated files that no longer matched their sourcesTests exercise the code and say nothing about the committed outputs derived from it, so the build is green and the artifacts are wrong. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  15. let a fast, cheap session make a decision the whole codebase now lives withCapability is dialled down for cost and nothing distinguishes the tasks where that is prudent from the ones where it is expensive. cost: highoccasional Why, and what to do →
  16. could not say why one provider was used for that work and another for thisProvider and model selection is made implicitly, per session, and recorded nowhere, so it cannot be reviewed or repeated. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  17. looked at the bill and could not say which of it produced anythingConsumption is measured per account and outcomes are recorded per person, so the two can never be joined. cost: mediumcommon Why, and what to do →
  18. published a page that promised more than any test could supportPublic material is written by a different act from the code, so it drifts ahead of the behaviour and nothing brings it back. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  19. spent the first hour in an unfamiliar repository working out what was normal hereWhat is conventional in a codebase is knowledge held by its regulars, so every arrival — human or machine — pays for it again. cost: mediumconstant Why, and what to do →
  20. reviewed a well-written contribution that broke a convention it had no way to discoverAssistants let anybody produce plausible contributions at volume; the conventions that make one correct are still only in the maintainers. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →
  21. could not reproduce a result because nothing recorded the state it came fromThe result is recorded and the conditions that produced it are not, so it is an anecdote rather than a measurement. cost: highoccasional Why, and what to do →
  22. was asked who made a change and under what policy, and had only a commitAttribution stops at the commit, so what authorised a change, what verified it and what governed it are unrecoverable. cost: highcommon Why, and what to do →