Anchor Architecture: A Minimal Structural Foundation for Software Traceability in AI-Assisted Software Development

Modern software development increasingly involves AI-assisted tools that generate or modify code and documentation. Existing traceability approaches assume that artifacts already possess stable identifiers and structural relationships. In practice, identifiers and structural bindings are often reconstructed after the fact, making traceability analysis speculative. This paper introduces Anchor Architecture, a minimal structural framework that establishes deterministic traceability conditions. The architecture defines two primitives: Anchor, a spatiotemporal coordinate that binds identity to artifacts, and Relationship, a structural adjacency relation between anchors. By modeling artifacts as anchors and relations, traceability becomes a deterministic structural property rather than an interpretive reconstruction. The framework is model-independent and compatible with contemporary AI-assisted software development workflows.