Pattern 8

Audit the workspace like a fitness function

Problem. A workspace degrades while the ecosystem around it improves. Context bloats, configs drift, a hook stops firing, memory contradicts reality, better patterns ship every week — and nobody's job is to notice either direction.

Pattern. A scheduled auditor runs on a cadence with two jobs. The first is finding improvements: research public sources for what the ecosystem has learned, and critique the workspace module-by-module against current best practice. The second is housekeeping: sweep configs, the security envelope, and drift. Findings land in the task list. Synthetic canaries verify the audit still detects known-bad fixtures every run. A finding ledger tracks accept and dismiss rates. There is deliberately no single numeric score: a self-improving audit that emits its own grade optimises for the grade (Goodhart's law).

Why this beats the obvious. "I'll clean it up when it bothers me" loses to a cadence with canaries, because drift is gradual and invisible right up until it isn't; "I'll look for upgrades when I have time" never fires at all.

Cost. The audit is itself a system to maintain, and it can cry wolf, so findings are tiered and tracked rather than dumped raw into the queue.

Where it lives: samples/.claude/agents/audit.md and samples/tests/audit_canaries/.

Seen in 0 of 8 teardowns · Practise: learn/03