Merging two codebases produced a layer rule baseline of 188 violations, where each had been under five.
$ vendor/bin/deptrac --formatter=baseline > deptrac-baseline.yaml
$ wc -l deptrac-baseline.yaml
188
# most of them one cause: the merged service had used a
# different namespace root, and the layer collectors
# only matched the old one.
$ # after fixing the collectors
188 → 22
A baseline that jumps is nearly always a configuration problem rather than a code problem, and treating it as accumulated debt would have meant accepting a rule that was not being applied to half the codebase. The remaining twenty-two were real and went down over two months, which is the normal rate when nobody is working on them specifically.