# How do you prevent AI-generated code from drifting away from your conventions over time?

> Source: <https://dev.to/marc_kumiko/how-do-you-prevent-ai-generated-code-from-drifting-away-from-your-conventions-over-time-4b3l>
> Published: 2026-06-28 10:52:37+00:00

We've been generating production features with AI for a while now — auth flows, billing hooks, notification handlers. And we've hit a pattern we don't have a good answer to yet.

The first feature the AI generates looks great. It reads the codebase, picks up the patterns, and the output looks like something a senior dev wrote.

The tenth feature? Less so. Small inconsistencies creep in:

None of it is wrong. All of it is subtly inconsistent.

**AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md** — helps, but gets stale and doesn't scale with the codebase

**Code review** — catches it, but defeats some of the speed advantage

**Linting + formatting** — catches easy stuff, misses semantic drift

What we haven't solved: giving the AI a "living" representation of your conventions that stays current as the codebase evolves.

We're building Kumiko — an opinionated SaaS framework — partly as an answer to this. If the framework constrains what's possible, drift has less surface area. But I'm not convinced that fully solves it either.

What's your approach?
