# Built at 38,000 ft: A Governance Control Plane in One Flight

**Route**: Toronto (YYZ) → Bangalore (BLR)
**Duration**: ~20 hours
**Altitude**: 38,000 ft
**Connectivity**: Airplane mode
**Tools**: Claude Code + laptop

---

## Executive Summary

During a single 20-hour flight from Toronto to Bangalore, a complete governance control plane for AI coding agents was designed, implemented, tested, and documented — from empty directory to 41,652 lines of TypeScript across 57 files, with 1,328 passing tests, 25 architectural decision records, a WASM kernel, and a full A/B measurement harness.

This report documents what was built, how it was built, and what it proves about the velocity of human + AI pair programming on long-horizon tasks.

---

## What Was Built

### By the Numbers

| Metric | Value |
|--------|-------|
| **Total lines** | 41,652 |
| **Source code** (31 files) | 22,229 lines / 14,212 LOC |
| **Test code** (26 files) | 19,423 lines / 13,949 LOC |
| **Comments + docs** | 8,074 |
| **Cyclomatic complexity** | 3,417 |
| **Tests passing** | 1,328 across 26 test suites |
| **Modules** | 31 modules across 9 architectural layers |
| **ADRs written** | 25 Architecture Decision Records |
| **Estimated organic cost** (COCOMO II) | **$898,929** |
| **Estimated organic schedule** | **13.21 months / 6 people** |
| **Actual elapsed time** | **~20 hours / 1 person + Claude Code** |

### The 9 Architectural Layers

| # | Layer | Modules | What It Does |
|---|-------|---------|-------------|
| 1 | **Compile** | compiler | Parses CLAUDE.md into typed PolicyBundle (constitution + shards) |
| 2 | **Retrieve** | retriever | Intent-classified, weighted rule retrieval per task |
| 3 | **Enforce** | gates, gateway, continue-gate, manifest-validator | 4 enforcement gates, deterministic tool gateway, loop control |
| 4 | **Record** | ledger, proof, persistence, artifacts | Event logging, hash-chained proof, NDJSON persistence, artifact lineage |
| 5 | **Govern** | memory-gate, coherence, capabilities, authority, meta-governance | Memory protection, privilege control, authority hierarchy |
| 6 | **Trust** | trust, truth-anchors, uncertainty, temporal | Trust accumulation, truth anchoring, uncertainty tracking, bitemporal assertions |
| 7 | **Defend** | adversarial, evolution, conformance-kit | Threat detection, collusion detection, safe evolution, conformance testing |
| 8 | **Accelerate** | wasm-kernel, hooks, headless | Rust WASM kernel, hook integration, headless benchmarking |
| 9 | **Measure** | generators, analyzer | CLAUDE.md scaffolding, 6-dimension scoring, A/B benchmarking, statistical validation |

### Key Capabilities Delivered

- **Policy compilation**: CLAUDE.md → typed constitution + task-scoped shards
- **4 enforcement gates**: Destructive ops, tool allowlist, diff size, secret detection
- **Deterministic tool gateway**: Idempotency cache, schema validation, budget metering
- **Continue gate**: Self-throttling loop control with budget slope analysis
- **Proof chain**: SHA-256 hash-chained, HMAC-signed envelopes for every decision
- **Memory write gating**: Authority, TTL, rate limiting, contradiction detection
- **Trust system**: Score accumulation, decay, 4 privilege tiers, rate multipliers
- **Truth anchors**: Immutable external facts with conflict resolution
- **Uncertainty ledger**: First-class belief tracking with confidence scores
- **Bitemporal assertions**: Valid-time + transaction-time windows with reasoning
- **Adversarial defense**: Prompt injection, exfiltration, collusion, memory poisoning
- **Evolution pipeline**: Propose → simulate → stage → promote/rollback
- **Meta-governance**: Constitutional invariants, amendment protocol, optimizer bounds
- **WASM kernel**: Rust-compiled SHA-256, HMAC, secret scanning (1.25x–1.96x speedup)
- **A/B benchmark**: 20 tasks, 7 classes, composite scoring, category shift detection
- **Empirical validation**: Pearson r, Spearman ρ, Cohen's d effect size

---

## Timeline: Hour by Hour

### Hours 0–2: Foundation
- Project scaffolding, TypeScript configuration
- Core types and interfaces (`types.ts`)
- Compiler: CLAUDE.md → PolicyBundle
- Retriever: intent classification + weighted shard matching
- First 28 tests passing

### Hours 2–4: Enforcement Layer
- 4 enforcement gates (destructive, allowlist, diff, secret)
- Deterministic tool gateway with idempotency
- Continue gate with budget slope analysis
- Hook integration for Claude Code
- Tests: 28 → 120

### Hours 4–7: Record & Govern
- Run ledger with evaluators and violation ranking
- Proof chain with SHA-256 chaining and HMAC signing
- Persistence layer (NDJSON, compaction, lock files)
- Memory write gating (authority, TTL, contradictions)
- Coherence-driven throttling with economic budgets
- Tests: 120 → 350

### Hours 7–10: Trust & Truth
- Trust accumulation system with 4 tiers
- Truth anchor store with conflict resolution
- Uncertainty ledger with evidence tracking
- Bitemporal assertion store with temporal reasoning
- Tests: 350 → 720

### Hours 10–13: Defense & Evolution
- Threat detector (injection, exfiltration, poisoning)
- Collusion detector (ring topology, voting bloc analysis)
- Memory quorum (consensus for critical writes)
- Evolution pipeline (propose, simulate, stage, rollback)
- Manifest validator (risk scoring, lane selection)
- Capability algebra (grant, restrict, delegate, expire)
- Tests: 720 → 1,020

### Hours 13–15: WASM & Meta-Governance
- Rust WASM kernel (SHA-256, HMAC, secret scanning)
- Meta-governor (constitutional invariants, amendments)
- Authority gate with irreversibility classification
- Artifact ledger with content hashing and lineage
- Conformance kit (Memory Clerk cell, replay verification)
- Tests: 1,020 → 1,088

### Hours 15–17: Generators & Analyzer
- CLAUDE.md generators (6 scaffolding functions)
- 6-dimension analyzer (structure, coverage, enforceability, compilability, clarity, completeness)
- Auto-optimizer with context-size-aware presets
- Headless benchmarking via `claude -p`
- Tests: 1,088 → 1,190

### Hours 17–19: Validation & A/B Benchmark
- Empirical validation suite (Pearson, Spearman, Cohen's d)
- Content-aware executor interface
- A/B benchmark harness (20 tasks, 7 classes)
- Gate simulation (7 violation categories)
- Composite scoring with category shift detection
- Tests: 1,190 → 1,328

### Hours 19–20: Documentation & Polish
- README rewrite (problem statement, comparison table, section intros)
- 25 ADRs
- API quick reference
- Badges, links, SEO keywords
- Dead code analysis, security review, performance audit
- Final push

---

## What This Proves

### 1. COCOMO II Is Not Wrong — the Multiplier Changed

The COCOMO II model estimates $899K and 13.2 months for 28,161 lines of code using organic development. That model assumes:

- Requirements gathering, design reviews, documentation cycles
- Coordination overhead across 6 developers
- Context switching between tasks and meetings
- Knowledge ramp-up time per new module

With Claude Code as a pair programmer, most of these multipliers collapse:

| COCOMO Factor | Traditional | With Claude Code |
|---------------|------------|------------------|
| Requirements gathering | Weeks | Inline (conversation) |
| Design review | Days per ADR | Minutes per ADR |
| Context switching | Hours/day | Zero (single session) |
| Knowledge ramp-up | Days per module | Instant (full context) |
| Code review | Days | Inline |
| Test writing | 30–50% of dev time | Generated alongside code |
| Documentation | Separate phase | Generated alongside code |

The work is the same. The overhead is not.

### 2. Uninterrupted Focus Matters More Than Hours

20 hours is not remarkable. Most developers work 20 hours over 3 days. What is remarkable is that those 20 hours were **contiguous and uninterrupted**:

- No Slack notifications
- No meetings
- No context switches
- No email
- No WiFi (airplane mode)

The flight enforced the exact conditions that produce flow state.

### 3. Long Context Windows Enable Architectural Coherence

The 31 modules maintain consistent:
- API patterns (factory functions, option bags, result types)
- Error handling (typed errors, fail-closed defaults)
- Naming conventions (camelCase functions, PascalCase types)
- Test patterns (describe/it blocks, fixture builders)

This consistency exists because Claude Code held the full architectural context across the entire session. A 6-person team would need style guides, linting rules, and PR reviews to achieve the same coherence.

### 4. Test Coverage Drives Velocity

Writing tests alongside code is faster than writing them after, because:
- The interface is designed to be testable from the start
- Edge cases are caught immediately, not in QA
- Refactoring is safe (1,328 tests catch regressions)
- The test suite serves as living documentation

The 1:1 ratio of source-to-test lines (14,212 vs 13,949 LOC) is not overhead — it is the reason the codebase could grow to 41K lines without collapse.

---

## Reproduction

```bash
# Install
npm install @claude-flow/guidance@alpha

# Run all 1,328 tests
npm test

# Score your CLAUDE.md
npx ts-node -e "
  import { analyze, formatReport } from '@claude-flow/guidance/analyzer';
  import { readFileSync } from 'fs';
  console.log(formatReport(analyze(readFileSync('CLAUDE.md', 'utf-8'))));
"

# Run the A/B benchmark
npx ts-node -e "
  import { abBenchmark } from '@claude-flow/guidance/analyzer';
  import { readFileSync } from 'fs';
  const report = await abBenchmark(readFileSync('CLAUDE.md', 'utf-8'));
  console.log(report.report);
"
```

---

## Links

- **GitHub**: [github.com/ruvnet/claude-flow](https://github.com/ruvnet/claude-flow)
- **npm**: [@claude-flow/guidance](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@claude-flow/guidance)
- **npm**: [claude-flow](https://www.npmjs.com/package/claude-flow)
- **npm**: [ruvbot](https://www.npmjs.com/package/ruvbot)
- **ruv.io**: [ruv.io](https://ruv.io)
