Sentinel: Autonomous Architectural Governance Through Commit Intelligence Across Multi-Repository Systems
Roberto Milev (Navan), Uday Kanagala (Navan)
Engineering & Operations Architectural Patterns & Composition
Summary
A system of choreographed asynchronous agents that provides continuous architectural governance by processing commits and validating implementation against documented design decisions across 120+ microservices.
Description
Large-scale software organizations document architectural decisions in technical design documents (TDDs) and architecture decision records (ADRs), but lack automated mechanisms to verify that implementation conforms to these specifications across repositories, teams, and time. We present Sentinel, a system of choreographed asynchronous agents that provides continuous architectural governance. A real-time agent processes every commit, extracting structured context into a two-tier memory model; a separate synthesis agent periodically aggregates these into development initiatives and validates them against documented architectural decisions. Deployed across 120+ microservices and 20 teams, Sentinel detected 18 architectural drift instances with 83% true positive rate, averaging 12 minutes from commit to drift flag.
