Vision drift: why agentic workflows need workflow auditing

How a distributed, event-sourced issue tracker built with developer ergonomics in mind may have a role to play in the next generation of agentic workflows

Vision drift

Harness engineering has recently popularized the idea of containing architectural drift in agentic workflows. What might be missing in the discussion is a similar issue on a higher level - vision drift.

By vision drift I mean that the implementation no longer drifts only from the architecture - it drifts from the original product intent. And it seems like the risk may be obscured by restricted tooling. As long as the project management tools only present a snapshot rather than a traceable story, there is an increased risk of undetected drift.

Drift is detected via specification audits over time. However, while code history easily can be traversed via Git, issue tracking essentially lacks this capability. Issue trackers tend to be excellent at answering the question “what is going on right now?”, but fail at answering the question “how did our work in this area evolve last month?” or “what went on this time last year?”, or “how did we get from there to there?”.

Workflow audits

When I set off to build Epiq, this was not a concern on my radar. Agentic coding was something I had heard distant rumors of, and in fact I was just