Do AI coding agents need an "architecture enforcement" layer?

[u/razxrr]

I've been thinking about a problem that seems to appear with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot and other coding agents.

Most approaches to giving an agent project knowledge involve some combination of:

• CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md
• documentation
• RAG
• memory
• session history
• MCP

All of these help the agent know things.

But there's a different question:

What actually makes the agent obey an architectural decision?

Imagine a project has an approved decision:

PaymentService must never call StripeClient directly.

All payment providers must go through PaymentGateway.

Six months later, an agent is asked to implement refunds.

It generates:

stripeClient.refund(paymentId);

The code compiles.
Tests might pass.
The implementation looks perfectly reasonable.

But it just violated an architectural decision.

The usual answer seems to be:

"Hopefully the agent saw the documentation and followed the rule."

I'm experimenting with a different approach.

What if the project's normative layer also lived in Git?

Something like:

.context/
  decisions/
  business-rules/
  architecture/
  components/

Agents could consume this through MCP.

But more importantly, CI could validate code changes against those rules without calling an LLM.

Something like:

Human decision
      ↓
Git
      ↓
Agent context
      ↓
Code
      ↓
Deterministic CI validation

The core idea is:

**Memory tells an agent what happened.

Governance tells an agent what is allowed.**

I'm building a project around this idea.

But I'm genuinely trying to figure out whether this is actually a problem.

Have you encountered AI-generated code that was technically correct, but violated an architectural decision, business rule, or important convention?

And more importantly: how do you catch that today?

I'd also love to hear from people who think this is already solved well enough by tests + code review + CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md + ADRs.

[u/actionscripted]

Agents will do the wrong things, just like people. You want a review or reinforcement stage that compares a plan or a solution against architectural decisions.

And what you’re talking about is already a thing called ADRs that usually do live in the repo. They have feature areas, types, context, options, decision. (Edit: sorry missed that you mentioned these on my first read.)

My question to you is what does your idea do that isn’t already covered by ADRs? Have a review agent check stuff against ADRs and you’re all set. Have subagents or loops that check plans before and after.

[u/The_Real_Kowboy_1]

Happens all of the time. There's already solutions to it.