The coupling-check pattern: catching the drift between any two artifacts that are supposed to agree.
A class diagram in my project claimed that two repository finders were each backed by a remote procedure call (RPC). Neither call existed. The diagram had been generated, reviewed, and committed, and it sailed through every check I had aimed at my diagrams, of which there were already three. It described a system slightly richer than the one I had actually built, and nothing flagged the difference.
It passed because each of those three checks looked at a different axis. One validated that every type named in the diagram resolved to a defined class. One read the architecture diagram's sequence operations. One forced a specific glyph to carry a citation. Each was a perfectly good check. But none of them coupled this claim, a finder asserting a backing call, to the place that claim was supposed to resolve: the actual service definition in the component's wire contract. The drift wasn't inside any one check. It lived in the seam between them, in the one direction nobody had wired up. The fix was a fourth check that closes the seam: every finder in the diagram must name a backing RPC that resolves to a real declaration in that component's protobuf, qualified by component so a pointer to the wrong service still fails, or else be tagged explicitly as proposed-but-unbuilt work. Run against the existing diagram, it found the two finders pointing at nothing. They had been asserting un-built calls, quietly, through every prior gate.
I've come to think that small episode is the most transferable thing in the project, more so than the terminology linter it grew out of, which I wrote up in a companion piece, .
Written by directing an AI agent, the same way the platform it describes was built. The editing and the judgment are mine.
References
- Vasyl Tretiakov, ","
martinfowler.com, 2 Apr 2026 (accessed 9 Jun 2026).
— validate
and visualize dependencies for JavaScript and TypeScript (accessed 9 Jun 2026).- Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software.
Addison-Wesley, 2003. ISBN 978-0321125217.
Published at vasyltretiakov.dev.
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