agentic-engineering / agent-governance
Agent Governance
Agent governance is the set of rules that decide what agents may do, who decides when they exceed it, and where the human authority actually sits.
In my rig those rules are written down as a constitution — versioned like code, enforced by the pipeline, not by good behavior.
The constitution
My agents operate under eleven written laws. The load-bearing ones:
- The builder never reviews its own work. Every diff gets an external, adversarial review gate — different model family.
- Humans merge. Agents never force-push, merge PRs, push to main, or approve their own work. They comment, open PRs, fix, and re-request review.
- Fail closed. A missing review verdict is a rejection, not a pass.
- Secrets never enter logs or argv. Credentials travel through channels designed for them.
- Right-size ceremony. Small change, light process; big change, spec first. Governance scales with blast radius, not uniformly.
A constitution that lives in a prompt is a suggestion. A constitution enforced by branch protection and a parse-or-reject gate is governance.
Permission boundaries
- Agents act under least-privilege, per-tool credentials — not the developer's full access.
- Destructive and outward-facing actions (deploys, publishes, deletions) require human confirmation by construction.
- Memory is versioned so an agent's context can be audited and rolled back like code.
- Spend is bounded by budget, and the budget is enforced by the platform, not requested by the prompt.
Governance is what makes autonomy safe
The point of governance is not to slow agents down; it is to make their autonomy grantable. You can only let an agent act without supervision in the domains where failure is bounded and observable. Everything else stays behind a human decision — and the system, not the agent, enforces which is which.
If you are scaling agents across a team, the governance review is the first half of the readiness audit; the workflow rollout is team onboarding.
Talk it through with someone who runs this stack on his own systems every day.