Governance profiles: Lite vs Assurance¶

Wardline supports two governance profiles that control how strictly findings and exceptions are enforced.

Quick Comparison¶

	Lite (default)	Assurance
Target	Open-source, startups, early-stage	Regulated, production, compliance-critical
Governance gaps	Emit warnings	Emit errors (block build)
Coherence failures	Manual gating	Auto-gate (build fails)
Exception fields	Recommended	All mandatory
Temporal separation	Alternatives allowed	Must be enforced
Typical adoption stage	Initial rollout, growing teams	Mature annotation coverage

When to Use Lite¶

Use lite when:

You are adopting Wardline for the first time
Your decorator coverage is still growing
You want findings to inform but not block development
Your team is learning the trust-tier model

Lite is the default. You do not need to set it explicitly.

# wardline.yaml — lite is the default
governance_profile: "lite"

When to Use Assurance¶

Use assurance when:

Your codebase has comprehensive decorator coverage
You operate under regulatory or compliance requirements
You want governance gaps to block the build, not just warn
You are ready for strict exception management

# wardline.yaml
governance_profile: "assurance"

What Changes with Assurance¶

Coherence failures auto-gate¶

In lite, a coherence failure (e.g., orphaned exception, fingerprint drift) produces a warning. In assurance, it produces an error and fails the build.

All exception fields are mandatory¶

In lite, fields like elimination_path and expires are recommended. In assurance, they are required — wardline exception add will reject entries without them.

Temporal separation must be enforced¶

Temporal separation is a governance mechanism that ensures policy changes and enforcement changes do not happen in the same commit. In lite, alternatives to temporal separation are allowed. In assurance, it must be enforced.

Migration Path¶

Moving from lite to assurance:

Run wardline coherence and fix all findings
Ensure all exceptions have expires and elimination_path
Set governance_profile: "assurance" in wardline.yaml
Run wardline scan — any new governance errors must be resolved

This is a one-way ratchet in practice — going back to lite from assurance weakens governance guarantees and should be treated as a deliberate decision.