Chapter 7: Governance, Versioning, and Drift Control

Welcome to Chapter 7: Governance, Versioning, and Drift Control. In this part of AGENTS.md Tutorial: Open Standard for Coding-Agent Guidance in Repositories, you will build an intuitive mental model first, then move into concrete implementation details and practical production tradeoffs.

This chapter ensures AGENTS.md stays trustworthy as repositories evolve.

Learning Goals

• establish ownership and review cadence
• detect stale instructions and command drift
• version instruction changes deliberately
• tie guidance updates to codebase changes

Governance Practices

• require AGENTS.md updates when build/test workflows change
• include instruction drift checks in periodic repo audits
• assign clear document owners per repository

Source References

• AGENTS.md Repository Governance Discussions
• AGENTS.md Sample File

Summary

You now have governance patterns to keep agent guidance accurate over time.

Next: Chapter 8: Ecosystem Contribution and Standard Evolution

Source Code Walkthrough

AGENTS.md

Governance and drift control depend on treating AGENTS.md as a version-controlled artifact with the same discipline as code. The upstream AGENTS.md itself is managed through standard pull requests and reviewed like any other file — the commit history for this file in the upstream repo illustrates how the specification evolves incrementally without breaking existing consumers.

Review the git log for AGENTS.md in the upstream repository to see what kinds of changes are considered breaking versus additive, which directly informs the versioning strategy described in this chapter.