Quality standards and guardrails

Problem

As more contributors add enrichment rules, metadata sources, and profiling layers to the context catalog, there are no enforced quality standards governing what constitutes acceptable output. Without guardrails, new contributions can introduce inconsistent field naming, unreliable enrichment logic, or metadata that degrades rather than improves AI agent performance. The lack of standards makes it impossible to maintain consistent context quality as the system scales beyond its original authors.

Context

• Teams are judging readiness for context schema/catalog contracts and Nimble enrichment flows across product surfaces inconsistently because there is no single quality bar that covers correctness, UX clarity, failure handling, and maintenance expectations.
• Without explicit standards, work gets approved on local intuition and later re-opened when another reviewer finds a gap that was never written down.
• Expected touchpoints include dataface/ai/, context-contract docs, eval wiring, and inspect-derived artifacts, review checklists, docs, and any eval or QA surfaces used to prove a change is safe to ship.

Possible Solutions

• A - Rely on experienced reviewers to enforce quality informally: flexible, but it does not scale and leaves decisions hard to reproduce.
• B - Recommended: define a concise quality rubric plus guardrails: specify acceptance criteria, required evidence, and clear anti-goals so reviews are consistent.
• C - Block all new work until a comprehensive handbook exists: safer in theory, but too heavy for the milestone and likely to stall momentum.

Plan

1. List the failure modes and review disagreements that matter most for context schema/catalog contracts and Nimble enrichment flows across product surfaces, using recent work as concrete examples.
2. Turn those into a small set of quality standards, required validation evidence, and explicit guardrails for unsupported or risky cases.
3. Update the relevant docs, task/checklist expectations, and test or QA hooks so the standards are actually enforced.
4. Use the rubric on a representative set of recent or in-flight items and tighten the wording anywhere it still leaves too much ambiguity.

Implementation Progress

Review Feedback

• [ ] Review cleared