Convention Drift is an upcoming Atlas capability that will compare the coding standards you wrote down, in files like your project guide, against what the code actually does. When a recently changed file breaks a rule you declared, such as one concern per file or no hard-coded singletons, it will surface the violation while it is fresh. The aim is to catch drift one file at a time, instead of discovering it all at once in review.
Standards you declared, quietly contradicted
You write down how the code should be built, and then it drifts, one file at a time, until review or never.
Convention Drift will treat each declared convention as a claim and your recently changed code as reality. When a new change breaks a rule, that violation surfaces while you can still fix it cheaply, instead of accumulating unseen.
Checks that match real rules
Some conventions can be checked exactly; others need judgment.
The capability is designed to ship deterministic checks for the rules that have a clear test, such as file length, one concern per file, and formatting rules for client-facing output, and to leave nuanced prose rules to an on-demand deeper pass. The everyday check stays fast and quiet.
New drift, not old debt
Flagging the entire codebase at once is noise; flagging what just changed is signal.
Convention Drift will scope its checks to files changed since the last pass, so the nudges are about fresh drift you introduced, not a backlog you already know about. It will be opt-in per workspace and tunable.
Frequently asked questions
- Is Atlas convention drift detection available now?
- Not yet. It is a planned Atlas capability described on this page.
- Where do the conventions come from?
- From the standards you declare in your project guide and an optional rules list, plus built-in defaults for common conventions.
- Will it check my whole codebase?
- No. It is designed to scope checks to recently changed files, so it flags new drift rather than legacy debt.
- Will it edit my code to fix violations?
- No. It surfaces and suggests; you decide what to change.
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