Architectural Governance at AI Speed

GenAI has made code production trivially fast, but architectural alignment remains a bottleneck. Traditional review boards and ADR wikis can't scale with AI-generated output. The proposed solution is 'Declarative Architecture': distilling architectural decisions into machine-enforceable formats using Event Models (eventmodel.json), OpenAPI validators/linters in CI/CD pipelines, and condensed architecture.md files that AI agents can reason over. Event Models enable vertical-slice code generation and the Ralph Loop (an AI agent iterating until specs pass). OpenAPI linters enforce cross-cutting API conventions automatically at build and deploy time. ADRs are distilled into terse, agent-readable directives in architecture.md, enforced by governance agents that open PRs when decisions drift. The goal: make the conformant path the path of least resistance, enabling decentralized governance without losing cohesion.