In my previous Radar article, “ Architectural Guardrails for AI-Generated Code ,” I argued that AI coding agents need a layer that can hold architectural decisions in a structured corpus, retrieve the relevant ones, put them into the agent’s context before it writes code, and enforce explicit constraints with reproducible checks. Testing that model exposed two distinctions I had compressed together.

Retrieving a decision because it is relevant doesn’t mean the decision applies to the artifact being changed.

A decision that does apply isn’t automatically suitable for deterministic enforcement.

The first distinction is between relevance and authority; the second is between guidance and enforcement.

Here’s the story of how one controlled repository made this distinction clear. The project used local JSON-backed persistence for its current phase, and an active architecture decision ruled out PostgreSQL, ORMs, and database migrations for the command-line application.…