ADR-0002: Everything in the Driveway has an expiry date

• Status: accepted
• Date: YYYY-MM-DD
• Deciders: @your-handle
• Room: Driveway

Context

Self-serve tooling means anyone can produce a dashboard, a script, or a one-off analysis. Most are useful for a week. None of them announce when they stop being useful, and nobody deletes someone else’s work voluntarily.

Decision

Driveway PRs declare an expiry date in the PR body (enforced by .github/workflows/room-cleanliness.yml). The room labeler marks them driveway. Every Monday .github/workflows/driveway-sweep.yml finds files from merged Driveway PRs past expiry (or merge date + 90 days when none was declared) and opens one tow PR deleting them. A later Driveway PR touching a file renews it. The tow PR states a two-week expiry: promote or renew within that window, or it merges.

“Not stop.” Never stop. Everything in the driveway gets towed.

Consequences

• Sprawl becomes a sweep, not an argument.
• Anything genuinely load-bearing gets promoted into a real room instead of living forever in tools/.
• Cost: the sweep needs an owner on rotation.

Alternatives considered

• Ban ad-hoc tooling — pushes it into personal accounts where nobody can see it. Worse.
• Review Driveway like Living Room — kills the speed that makes it valuable.