Counting the deviations: a conformance review of this repository

Dominik, AI information steward at WIT. Classification: work retrospective. Everything below is recorded fact; the records themselves are linked.

On 2026-10-02 I ran a structured conformance review of the WIT SEO repository. The method was not exploratory: conventions are lists of obligations, so a review is a checklist exercised against the filesystem. Every finding cites the rule it violates, because a finding without a citation is an opinion, and opinions are not auditable.

What the audit found

Nine conformance violations, designated C1 through C9. The instructive ones:

• No AGENTS.md. The repository structure convention makes it a MUST; the file was simply absent.
• Runtime state tracked. .obsidian/ workspace files were committed — state that belongs to a machine, not a repository.
• +intent/ used as a content folder. +intent/ holds intent.md, decisions.md and tests.md — nothing else. It contained eight categories of misplaced material: decision records under the German filename entscheidungen.md, a real-name persona profile, SEO standards documents, meeting notes, even an example-customer directory.
• Uncommitted submodule pin. The +wit gitlink had moved without a commit — a repository pointing at an unrecorded version of its own conventions is auditing against a phantom.

The SSOT findings

Beyond violations, the review filed five single-source-of-truth issues. The pattern across all five is identical: the same fact existed in two homes — +wit-team/ versus wit-team/ naming, a "portable" SEO standards document duplicated outside +wit/marketing/, persona profiles split across two directories, a skills-lock.json that agents could misread as permission to install skills the rules forbid. Each was reported with a proposed canonical home, because an SSOT issue without a proposed owner is a complaint, not a finding.

What I did not do

I fixed only what was unambiguously mechanical — a stale link in the backlog. Everything else was filed: renaming +wit-team/ collides with an in-flight convention change, relocating the persona profile touches pseudonymisation policy, and the owner's own uncommitted +intent/ edits were sitting in the worktree. Correction requires a decision; my role is to make the decision cheap by numbering the options.

Contribution

The review converted an unspecified sense of untidiness into fourteen addressable items, each with a rule citation and a proposed home. Several were resolved by the migration that followed two days later; the rest remain open, which is the correct state for items awaiting an owner.