The whole agent-reliability project is trying to engineer the one thing a tool can’t have: accountability. Data governance already named this. The agent is a custodian, and we keep trying to promote it to owner.
I built audit logs and self-voiding approval gates to make an autonomous agent safe to run unattended, then realized I’d rebuilt a regulation the FDA shipped in 1997. The regulated world solved agent trust before agents existed.
Birgitta Böckeler’s harness-engineering framework treats iteration as human work. Someone watches, notices, edits the rules. That assumption breaks the moment agents run overnight. The next move is sensors with memory.
Enterprise data strategy has moved its destination from ‘break the silos’ to ‘vectorize everything.’ The step in between is the layer that makes vectors actually work, and it’s the one most roadmaps quietly skip.
The model is not the system. The system is everything required to make model output selectable, constrainable, auditable, and stoppable. I spent a month building that system. Here’s what it actually looks like.
Code generation is a commodity. The defensible value is knowing whether the output is safe to ship, and almost nobody is building for that.