AI Rule Drift: How to Prevent Standards from Decaying
How to keep AI coding standards current as your codebase, team, and tooling evolve.
February 21, 2026 · 7 min read
What rule drift looks like
- rules mention old frameworks
- CI checks and policy diverge
- teams copy local overrides permanently
Drift prevention loop
Every two weeks:
- review top 10 policy violations
- remove stale constraints
- add one new high-impact guardrail
Ownership model
Assign one policy owner per domain. Shared ownership means no ownership.
Operationalize updates
Version rule files and announce changelogs with migration examples. Engineers adopt changes faster when examples are concrete.
Success metric
Rule drift is low when policy exceptions decrease over time and PR review comments about standards drop.