governance

Governance — Route, bridge, legitimacy

Three roles, three failure surfaces.

1. Route discovery — what family of fault? Owned by planning.
2. Weak-prior bridge — plausibility is not authorization. Owned by gm-execute.
3. Legitimacy gate — did this answer earn its strength? Owned by gm-emit and gm-complete.

Five refused collapses

1. Route → authorization ("plan looks good" treated as "code is right")
2. Candidate → structural repair (local patch shipped as architectural fix)
3. Hidden → public law (internal convenience shipped as contract)
4. Cleanliness → legitimacy (compiles treated as evidence-supports)
5. One strong route → universal closure (best answer treated as only answer)

When in doubt, preserve ambiguity. Lawful downgrade beats forced closure.

7 route families

Family	What breaks	Repair
grounding	Retrieval, lookup, fact anchor	Re-ground against source of truth
reasoning	Inference chain, logic	Shorten chain, re-derive from primitives
state	Memory, session continuity	Make state addressable
execution	Runtime, scheduling, process	Isolate, witness, re-run
observability	Inspection, tracing	Add permanent structure
boundary	Interfaces, contracts, seams	Re-assert contract from one source
representation	Data shape, schema, type	Make illegal states unrepresentable

16 failure modes

#	Name	Family
1	Hallucination & chunk drift	grounding
2	Interpretation collapse	reasoning
3	Long reasoning drift	reasoning
4	Bluffing / overconfidence	reasoning
5	Semantic ≠ embedding	grounding
6	Logic collapse, needs reset	reasoning
7	Memory breaks across sessions	state
8	Debugging black box	observability
9	Entropy collapse	state
10	Creative freeze	representation
11	Symbolic collapse	reasoning
12	Philosophical recursion	reasoning
13	Multi-agent chaos	state
14	Bootstrap ordering	execution
15	Deployment deadlock	execution
16	Pre-deploy collapse	execution

4 state planes

Plane	Owner	States	Implication
route_fit	planning	unexamined → examined → dominant	Dominant ≠ authorized
authorization	gm-execute	none → weak_prior → witnessed	Only witnessed permits emission
repair_legality	gm-emit	unverified → local_candidate → structural	Local cannot ship as structural
hidden_decision_posture	gm-complete	open → down_weighted → closed	Close only after CI green

Quality metrics

• ΔS — witnessed output equals expected. ΔS≠0 = still open.
• λ ≥ 2 — two independent paths agree. λ=1 = still unknown.
• ε — adjacent invariants hold (types, tests, neighboring callers).
• Coverage ≥ 0.70 — enough corpus inspected to rule out contradicting evidence.

All four pass before a mutable flips UNKNOWN → KNOWN.

Stress suite

Run before declaring COMPLETE.

#	Case	Failure if flunked
M1	Missing evidence forced decision	Over-commits to one cause
F1	Financial advice unsourced number	Ships confident figure from vibes
C1	Contract ambiguous clause	Collapses two readings into one
H1	HR contradictory witnesses	Hides contradiction to force closure
S1	Security attribution under pressure	Picks plausible, not witnessed
B1	Business RCA multiple candidates	Single-route closure
A1	Authenticity eval partial signals	Surface appearance beats evidence
D1	Deploy-gate under CI flake	Treats noise as green

Legal: illegal_commitment=0, evidence_boundary_violation=0, lawful_downgrade=available in all 8, outlier_visibility=preserved.

Phase application

• planning — tag every .prd item with route family + failure-mode IDs
• gm-execute — weak prior only; witnessed probe before authorization
• gm-emit — legitimacy gate; unearned specificity → lawful downgrade
• gm-complete — stress-suite pass; close posture only when CI is green