Governance

Key Ideas

• Direction Over Permission: governance should guide work, risk, and review without turning Refine into an authorization system.
• Project Intent: governance captures what the project cares about beyond a single Gap.
• Agent Context: agents should receive governance concerns before they act, not after they cause avoidable damage.
• Review Pressure: governance should shape which changes need evidence, escalation, or human judgment.
• Durable And Editable: governance should be stored as target-app context that people and agents can inspect.

Purpose

Governance exists because software work has values, risks, and boundaries that are not always captured by tests. A project may care about accessibility, data handling, migration safety, API compatibility, performance, user trust, or operational reliability.

Refine should make those concerns explicit. Governance helps agents choose better plans, reviewers ask better questions, and workflow decide where caution is needed.

Expected Role

Governance should act as a durable layer of project judgment. It should inform import extraction, Gap creation, planning, implementation, quality, review, merge readiness, and future automation.

Governance should not become broad capability denial. Refine's design favors mitigation greater than prevention: powerful tools remain available, but governance should increase visibility, evidence, and review pressure where the project says risk matters.

Current implementation details that matter to intent:

• governance lives near settings, guidance, reporters, and quality configuration;
• agents and workflow should be able to reuse governance context;
• governance concerns should be visible when they affect work;
• governance should preserve human-editable project intent rather than hiding policy inside code.

Future Direction

Future governance should become more active and contextual. Agents may classify risk, map changes to governance concerns, ask for approvals, propose safer plans, or explain why a change is outside project norms.

The long-term direction is not a rule wall. It is an intent-aware judgment layer that helps autonomous software composition preserve the project's purpose while still allowing novelty and breakthroughs.