Enforce Human Pace

Add the Human Pace constraint and cadence drift GC rule to keep AI-assisted development at a pace humans can review, understand, and learn from.

What is Human Pace?

Human Pace is a set of signals ensuring that AI-generated output stays scoped to what a human can meaningfully review. It prevents the failure mode where AI produces large, bundled PRs faster than the team can absorb — eroding understanding and compounding technical debt.

Two mechanisms enforce it:

  1. Spec-scoped changes constraint — each feature or behaviour-change PR traces to a single spec. One concern per PR.
  2. Change cadence drift GC rule — weekly check that PR size distribution and spec-to-merge cycle time haven’t drifted upward.

1. Add the spec-scoped changes constraint

Run /harness-constrain and add:

### Spec-scoped changes

- **Rule**: Each feature or behaviour-change PR should trace to a single
  spec. Bug fixes, dependency updates, and other maintenance changes do
  not require a spec but should still be coherently scoped — one concern
  per PR. PRs that bundle unrelated changes must be decomposed.
- **Enforcement**: agent
- **Tool**: harness-enforcer (reviews against The Human Pace)
- **Scope**: pr

Or use the HARNESS.md template from /superpowers-init, which includes this constraint by default as of v0.9.3.

2. Add the change cadence drift GC rule

Run /harness-gc to add a new rule, or add directly to the Garbage Collection section of HARNESS.md:

### Change cadence drift

- **What it checks**: Whether PR size distribution (median lines
  changed) or spec-to-merge cycle time has increased over the past
  month, indicating the human pace is being lost to AI-speed production
- **Frequency**: weekly
- **Enforcement**: agent
- **Tool**: harness-gc agent (analyses recent merged PRs via git log)
- **Auto-fix**: false

3. Assessment signals

The /assess command now recognises Human Pace signals at multiple literacy levels:

Level Signal
2 (Verification) Small, TDD-paced diffs visible in commit history
3 (Habitat Engineering) Spec-scoped changes constraint in HARNESS.md; change cadence drift GC rule active
4 (Specification Architecture) Spec-to-PR mapping — each spec produces one PR
5 (Sovereign Engineering) Change cadence metrics reviewed as team health signal

These signals are checked automatically during assessment and contribute to the level score.

When to use this

  • After running /superpowers-init or /harness-init on a new project
  • When the team notices PRs growing in size or scope
  • When assessment reveals missing Human Pace signals
  • When onboarding a team that is new to AI-assisted development