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Systems

Project Standards

Versioned standards with schemas, adoption mechanisms, validation, and drift gates that a repository can be held to.

Identification

Reference
L3D-SYS-004
Class
standard / platform
Maturity
stable
Primary field
Reliability & Assurance
Fields
Reliability & Assurance, Infrastructure & Operations, AI & Autonomous Systems
Practices
Model, Control, Verify, Recover
Record route
/systems/project-standards
Content reviewed
2026-09-03

Purpose

A convention that lives in someone’s memory is not a standard. Project Standards turns repository conventions into versioned packages a repository can adopt, be validated against, and be shown to have drifted from.

The intended operator is whoever maintains a set of repositories that are supposed to agree with each other.

Operating model

A catalog pins a release. A repository adopts packages from that release, and the adoption is recorded locally rather than inferred. Validation then answers a narrow question: does this repository still match what it adopted?

Ownership is explicit. Some files belong to the standard and are managed; others belong to the consumer and are never rewritten. That distinction is what makes an upgrade safe to run unattended — the tool knows what it is allowed to touch.

Practices

Control is the ownership model: managed regions, consumer regions, and a refusal to edit across the line.

Model is the schema work. A standard that cannot be expressed as a schema cannot be checked.

Verify is validation and drift detection, which is what turns a standard from a document into a gate.

Recover is the upgrade path. A repository that has fallen behind needs a route forward that does not begin with discarding local work.

Architecture

The pinned catalog is the authority; the CLI is a way to act on it. Packages are versioned independently so a repository can move one concern forward without moving all of them.

The rejected shortcut was a single global configuration shared across repositories. Shared mutable state turns every repository’s upgrade into every other repository’s problem.

Evidence

The repository is public under Apache-2.0 and carries tagged releases. This site’s own quality gate is one of its consumers.

Availability

Use directly open-source

Open source under Apache-2.0, with versioned releases. Read the source and adopt it directly.

View source for Project Standards, opens in a new tab

Capabilities demonstrated

Repeatable work this system is evidence for. The relationship is authored on this record.

Evidence

Systems

Stack

Python

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