The audit that started everything: how Waaseyaa designed an invariant-driven architectural review

Ahnii! This is Part 1 of the Waaseyaa Governance series. It covers how Waaseyaa — a PHP framework monorepo of 52 packages — ran a formal invariant-driven architectural audit, what it found across five concern passes, and how Milestone 2 turned those findings into the eight-milestone remediation program covered in Part 2. Prerequisites Familiarity with PHP Composer package mechanics (extra, autoload, provider discovery) Comfort reading GitHub issue-driven governance workflows No prior knowledge of Waaseyaa required What Drift Looks Like at Scale Waaseyaa is a PHP framework organized into a 7-layer architecture across 52 Composer packages. The layers run from L0 (foundation infrastructure) up through L6 (interfaces — the admin SPA, SSR, and other user-facing surfaces). The constraint that makes the model useful is simple: packages may only import from their own layer or lower. Upward communication must go through sanctioned seams. That constraint is easy to state and hard to maintain. Fe