Provenance

Definition

Provenance in the Agentic SDLC is the traceable chain of human intent and verification behind every artifact.

As AI reduces the cost of generating code to near-zero, the value of software shifts from the volume of lines produced to its accountability. Code that appears magically (“vibe coding”) without clear direction has low provenance and acts as a liability. Code that results from specific human intent, articulated in a Spec and verified by a Gate, has high provenance.

The Theory of Value

The “Code is Cheap” philosophy fundamentally alters how we value software engineering activities:

1. Code is Cheap: LLMs provide an effectively infinite supply of syntax.
2. Attention is Finite: Human bandwidth to verify and steer is the bottleneck.
3. Provenance is Value: We value what we can trust. Trust comes from knowing who steered the agent and how it was verified.

“When one gets that big pull request (PR) on an open source repository, irrespective of its quality, if it is handwritten by a human, there is an intrinsic value and empathy for the human time and effort that is likely ascribed to it… That is what makes that code ‘expensive’ and not cheap.” — Kailash Nadh

In an agentic system, we cannot rely on “effort” as a proxy for value. We must rely on provenance—the audit trail that proves a human intended for this code to exist and verified that it serves that intent.

The Spec as “Expensive Talk”

Linus Torvalds famously said, “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”

In the AI era, this overrides. Code is cheap. Show me the talk.

“The Talk” is the Spec—the high-fidelity articulation of requirements, constraints, and architecture. Generating 10,000 lines of code is trivial; articulating exactly what those 10,000 lines should do is the hard, high-value work.

ASDLC Usage

Provenance is enforced through three mechanisms:

1. Intent Provenance (The Spec): Every change must trace back to a defined PBI or Spec. No “random acts of coding.”
2. Verification Provenance (Context Gates): Every state transition is gated by a verifiable check (e.g., “Verified by architect-agent using checklist-v1”).
3. Audit Provenance (Micro-Commits): Granular commits reveal the step-by-step reasoning of the agent, rather than a giant “slop” PR.

Applied in:

• The Spec — The primary artifact of Intent Provenance.
• Context Gates — The checkpoints of Verification Provenance.
• Micro-Commits — The unit of Audit Provenance.