Drift
Definitions
Disagreement between a token's provenance sources — what production says, what the design file says, what was authored
Recorded, never silently resolved: the authored value is a decision, and a decision that contradicts its sources should say so out loud.
The distance between what the design system says and what production does
The design system records the first; the gate measures the second. Neither repository owns the word.
A recorded claim — in a handoff, an issue, a summary, a pinned footer — that no longer matches the tree it describes
The most expensive failures in the handoff series were sentences nobody re-tested that steered work for days (docs/handoffs/README.md keeps the audited list). A claim about why something failed is a hypothesis written in the voice of an observation; re-verify the mechanism before building on it, and read a sibling checkout's facts from its origin, not its working tree.
Two repositories, one meaning, two verbs: drift is recorded on the token and measured on the page. What they share is the refusal to make it go away by overwriting: a value that disagrees with its source is a finding, not a bug to be fixed by matching.
Avoid: "fixing" drift by overwriting the authored value to match a source; and, in the third sense, correcting a drifted claim in the document without saying what it said before — the negative result is the useful part.