Governing AI coding agents
A practical guide to keeping AI-generated code auditable and safe at scale — approval gates, blast radius, spec drift, and release confidence.
AI agents can generate more change than a team can safely review, integrate, and remember. Governance is how you keep velocity without losing control. This guide covers the four controls Skaftor applies to every change.
1. Approval gates
Gate progression between delivery phases and on releases. A gate blocks until its condition is met — human sign-off, a passing check — producing an audit trail of who approved what and why.
2. Blast radius
Before merge, know what a change can affect. Skaftor computes blast radius from the dependency and ownership graph, so review and testing scale to real reach rather than diff size.
3. Spec drift
Specs rot silently as code changes. Skaftor keeps specs linked to code and runs drift detection as a background automation, routing divergences to a drift inbox before they become incidents.
4. Release confidence
Replace the gut-feel ship decision with an explainable score combining coverage, gate status, open drift, and blast radius. You can see which factor is holding a release back and act on it.
Frequently asked questions
How is governance different from CI checks?
CI checks verify code mechanics (build, tests, lint). Governance gates enforce process and policy — human approvals, readiness thresholds, resolved drift, acceptable blast radius — and gate progression across the whole delivery lifecycle, not just the build.