Agent-Introduced
Drift Rate
The percentage of agent-authored PRs introducing ungoverned architectural drift with no linked Change Intention.
This page describes the intended design. It requires agent-authorship attribution (e.g. commit co-author signatures), which doesn't exist anywhere in the product yet. It doesn't appear on your dashboard yet, and no org currently has a live value for it.
CDA deviations and
no linked CHI
÷ total agent-authored PRs)
× 100
What it signals
ADRIFT is the direct measurement of AI coding tools introducing ungoverned architectural drift. No other tool produces this number — ADRIFT requires both agent PR attribution AND a CDA Lens evaluation pipeline to exist simultaneously. It is not inferred from aggregate drift statistics. It is computed per-PR, per-agent, per-violation.
ADRIFT isolates the agent contribution to drift separately from human UDR. In an org where 40% of PRs are agent-authored, UDR alone cannot tell you whether the governance gap is a human process problem or an AI tooling problem. ADRIFT makes that attribution precise. A high UDR with a low ADRIFT means the governance problem is a human workflow issue. A high ADRIFT means the agents are ungoverned.
As orgs adopt AI coding tools at scale, ADRIFT becomes the leading indicator of architectural risk accumulation. An ADRIFT of 25% means 1 in 4 agent PRs is introducing ungoverned structural change. At 50 agent PRs per week, that is 12–13 unreviewed architectural decisions per week compounding silently — each one potentially contradicting a Lens rule, a Pillar constraint, or an approved design direction that the agent had no visibility into.
How rkito produces it
Every PR is evaluated for agent authorship and architectural conformance. The two signals are combined: a PR must be agent-authored, have CDA Lens violations, and have no approved Change Intention linked to the branch. ADRIFT is the percentage of agent PRs that satisfy all three conditions over a rolling 30-day window.
Who this metric is for
ADRIFT is the metric that makes AI adoption risk visible. A CTO approving AI coding tools without ADRIFT measurement is flying blind on what those tools are doing to the architecture. ADRIFT converts AI tooling investment from a governance unknown into a governed, measured engineering capability.
ADRIFT broken down by Pillar shows specifically which architectural security rules are being violated by agent-generated code — not code-level vulnerabilities, but structural security design violations. An agent generating code without security Lens context is the structural risk, not the code it writes.
ADRIFT is the 6-month early warning. Agent-introduced ungoverned structural changes are the category most likely to produce systemic operational failures. They compound weekly, bypass operational review, and surface as incidents that cannot be explained by the approval history.
Watch
ADRIFT is NOT an argument against AI coding tools. This is the single most critical misuse to prevent. High ADRIFT means agents are generating code without rkito MCP integration — without pre-loaded design context, Lens criteria, or approved Change Intentions. The remediation is MCP integration, not restricting the tools.
An org that uses high ADRIFT to justify banning AI coding tools from the pipeline has misread the signal. The signal is: your agents are ungoverned. The response is: govern them. With rkito MCP integration active, agents load Lens criteria before the first line of code is written.
ADRIFT approaches zero for properly governed agents.
Not because agents are restricted, but because they are informed. An agent with full Lens context, Pillar constraints, and an approved Change Intention loaded via MCP before the first token of code is generated will conform by default. ADRIFT measures the absence of that context — not a deficiency in the agents themselves.
What to do at each threshold
Step-by-step response playbook for each signal state.
Agents are operating within governed bounds. Confirm the signal is real, not a detection gap.
Verify agent attribution is working — check that MCP access logs are being correctly correlated with commits. A near-zero ADRIFT with low agent adoption is expected; near-zero with high agent adoption indicates either very good MCP integration or under-detection.
Confirm commit signature coverage is comprehensive. If only one agent tool's signatures are configured, other agents may be authoring PRs that escape ADRIFT detection entirely and are counted in UDR instead.
Some agent PRs are missing design context. Find the pattern before it compounds.
Navigate to /changecontrols/designaudits, filter by agent-authored PRs and FAIL status. Identify which Lenses are failing on agent PRs versus human PRs.
If agent PRs fail different Lenses than human PRs, the agents lack specific design context. Identify the missing MCP context load — which Lens criteria are not being pre-loaded into the agent session before code generation starts.
Treat as an AI governance incident. Quantify the exposure before acting.
Quantify first: agent PRs per week × ADRIFT rate = ungoverned structural changes per week entering the codebase. Present this number to engineering leadership as the cost of un-integrated AI tooling — not an argument to stop using agents, but a precise case for MCP deployment.
The remediation is rkito MCP module deployment — not slowing down AI adoption. Deploy MCP integration to the agent toolchain, pre-load Lens criteria and Pillar constraints into agent sessions, and require CHI linkage before agent branches are opened. ADRIFT will follow.
The org-wide drift signal that ADRIFT decomposes. When UDR is high, ADRIFT isolates how much of that gap is agent-generated versus human process failure.
The complementary agentic metric. AHCR measures whether agents are handing off correctly; ADRIFT measures whether what they built conformed structurally.
The leading indicator for ADRIFT. Low MCPCAR predicts high ADRIFT — agents not loading design context before coding will produce ungoverned structural changes.
What is your org's ADRIFT?
rkito calculates ADRIFT automatically on every agent-authored PR. Connect your repo and see your agentic governance gap within minutes.