My AI Maintainer Kept Making Wrong Calls. So I Made It Report Its State Before Touching Anything.

🔎 Glossary: terms used in this article 🔸 MICA (Memory Invocation & Context Archive): A governance schema for AI context management. Defines how context should be structured, trusted, scored, and handed off across sessions. 🔸 memory_injection: A MICA operational mode. The archive is updated after each maintenance session and read by the next AI session to compensate for session amnesia. 🔸 Session Report Format: The structured opening output the model must produce at session start — declaring archive version, self-test result, drift status, and active invariants — before any repository-level work begins. 🔸 Self-Test Policy: Machine-evaluable checks that validate the archive against the real project state: file existence, hash integrity, and invocation protocol presence. 🔸 Drift Response Policy: The schema-level declaration of how hash mismatches and missing files are handled. Different failure classes carry different response actions. 🔸 Design Invariant: A structured governanc