Repo Standards Schema

This document describes the current schema behind Repo Standards and Requirements.

Repo Standards answer:

What requirements does this repo currently observe, guide on, or require?

They are intentionally separate from implementation code and from the current Repo Map file.

Why The Shape Exists

Without a standards artifact, teams usually end up with one of two bad outcomes:

• standards are buried in bespoke scripts, so nobody can tell which requirements are durable and which are temporary
• every requirement is flattened into one severity level, so guidance and hard gates are treated the same

The current schema makes requirement intent explicit.

Current Rule Classes

Schema field names still use rules for the requirement list:

• hard-invariant: a requirement the repo cannot silently drift from
• promotable-policy: a strong preference that may later become required
• advisory-pattern: useful guidance worth surfacing without hard blocking
• brittle-implementation-check: the current source-shape validation rail, replaceable when stronger evidence kinds land

Product Enforcement Ladder

Product language should use:

• Observe: collect evidence only
• Guide: provide correction or review feedback
• Require: require fresh evidence or authority-backed exception

Current schema values map roughly to:

• recommend -> Observe or Guide, depending on output
• warn -> Guide
• block -> Require

The point of keeping both classification and enforcement/stage metadata is that they answer different questions:

• Classification: what kind of requirement is this?
• Enforcement: how strongly should Veritas apply it right now?

Current Reference

Use repo-standards/work-agent-convergence.repo-standards.json as the current schema example.