Developer finds two-thirds of architecture rules unenforceable by automated tools

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A developer maintaining a plain-English architecture document for a platform they built with an AI coding agent wanted to test how much of it could be automatically verified. After analysing all 24 documented decisions, only 8 turned out to be checkable with deterministic tooling, while 8 were unverifiable process rules and the rest were contextual knowledge statements. The developer built a custom checker that caught 13 real violations on its first run, including frontend components bypassing the service layer for months undetected. Three invariants failed to translate into checks for distinct reasons: missing structural boundaries in the code, the need for cross-file comparison logic, and semantic understanding beyond pattern matching. The exercise revealed that architecture documents often describe systems that do not yet structurally exist in the codebase, making enforcement impossible until the code catches up.

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