A surveyor charts the reef; the captain decides whether to dredge. The survey reads the water, reports what it found with evidence, and stops. It is the maintenance twin of the loft: where the loft answers one design question before building, the survey answers "where is this repo getting harder to change, and what would deepen it" after building.
When to survey
- Periodically — every few days of active building, or after a batch of tickets lands.
- Out of turn, when the repo starts feeling harder to change than it was last week: edits touching more files than they should, interfaces growing to satisfy one caller, tests that must be updated in lockstep for unrelated reasons.
Optional argument narrows the survey to a directory or area; with no argument, survey the whole repo.
The survey
- Read the repo's architecture principles (CLAUDE.md, ADRs) and the seeded seam vocabulary in
docs/standards/architecture.md— the definitions of seam and deep module. - Walk the module graph of the target area — and when no direction was given, weight the walk toward the yard's busy water: read a good stretch of the commit history first and let the areas that keep coming up pull the survey, because deepening pays off where future edits will land. A scattered history with no hot spot widens the net.
- Look for three finding classes:
- Shallow modules — wide interface, thin behavior; callers know more than the module hides.
- Hypothetical seams — a boundary crossed by exactly one adapter with no second caller; checkable by counting callers.
- Logic behind the wrong seam — behavior living on the far side of a boundary that does not own its data.
Apply the demolition test to every suspect: if the module were removed, would its complexity vanish (a pass-through wearing a uniform) or reappear across its callers (load-bearing)? Only load-bearing shallowness is a finding.
The report
Rank candidates by leverage against risk. Each candidate carries:
- Evidence — file:line for the interface, its callers, and the behavior.
- The deepening move — what to deepen, merge, or move, in one sentence.
- The risk note — what the move touches and what could break.
Every candidate states the yard's shared findings vocabulary — severity (how much friction the shallowness causes), confidence (a survey finding is heuristic-class and therefore low by construction; the mechanically checkable end of the scale belongs to the drydock --check audit), and actionable (whether the deepening move is specific enough to start from the report alone). End the report with the top recommendation: the one candidate to deepen first, and why — the captain reads one card, not the whole reef.
Logbook conflicts. A candidate that contradicts an existing ADR is nominated only when the friction is real: the card names the ADR and why the water has changed. Theoretical conflicts stay off the report — the logbook's rejections are not re-litigated by default.
The report may be rendered visually with the repo's diagram skill when the yard has one; the prose report stays the source of truth either way.
Handoff
The report is decision input, not work. Candidates feed the mission brief (launch Phase 1) or grilling material for the next effort. Survey proposes; the captain disposes.
Grill the top candidate on the spot. When the captain wants to act on the survey immediately rather than filing it, the report's top recommendation becomes the first question of a design-tree interview in the same session — launch Phase 1's frontier protocol, run right here: what would deepening this candidate involve, what does it cost, what does it unblock. The evidence is fresh and the captain is present; a finding worked now is a decided effort, not a report waiting to go stale. The survey still makes no edits — the interview decides, and delivery goes through launch's own gates.
A candidate the captain declines with a load-bearing reason is offered as an ADR — the same ADR test launch applies (hard to reverse, surprising without context, a real tradeoff) — so the next survey does not re-nominate the same reef. Declined without one, it simply sinks.
Non-goals
- No code edits. The survey never refactors, not even "while it's fresh."
- Not a gate. Nothing blocks on the report.
- Not merged into the drydock drift audit.
--checkstays strictly mechanically checkable — high-confidence findings only. Architecture judgment is a low-confidence heuristic; mixing it in dilutes the contract.
Completion definition
The survey is done when the report exists with evidence, rankings, and risk notes for every finding — and no file was modified.