Epistemic Drift
“What I call epistemic drift: the degradation of justificatory continuity across structural change, whether or not this degradation is immediately reflected in invariant violation, traceability loss, structural incoherence, or functional failure.”
— Code Structure Evolution (2026), abstract
Why it matters
Epistemic drift names the diachronic failure mode of the AF programme: what is lost when software preserves function but not justification. It transforms what looked like an occasional maintenance risk into a structural condition of any evolving artifact— and one that AI-assisted modification renders unavoidable.
Notes
Epistemic drift is presented as a latent condition: structural and functional indicators may remain intact while the justificatory residue—the encoded reasons behind invariants, architectural constraints, and historically grounded decisions—erodes silently. Three operational proxies are proposed for diagnosing structural manifestations of drift: Structural Integrity, Invariant Preservation, and Traceability Continuity.
The thesis is that generative AI does not create this fragility; it makes it impossible to ignore by transforming an occasional risk into an operational regime defined by scale, opacity, and speed.