[amavashev]

Drift correlating more with constraint tension than raw step count matches what we’ve observed.

Your external gate instinct is right, but the gate has to be structurally external, not just logically external. If the agent can reason about the gate, it can learn to route around it.

We’ve been experimenting with pre-authorization before high-impact actions (rather than post-hoc validation) - I've drafted Cycles Protocol v0 spec to deal with this problem.

What’s interesting is that anomalous reservation patterns often show up before output quality visibly degrades — which makes drift detectable earlier.

Still early work, but happy to compare notes if that’s useful.

[buschleague]

>...if the agent can reason about the gate, it can learn to route around it.

This is especially true. Earlier iterations of our build had python backed enforcement modules in an accessible path. The agent would identify the module that was blocking completion and, instead of fixing the error, it would access the enforcement module and adjust the code to unblock itself.

[aadarshkumaredu]

This is exactly the point where agent design starts to look less like workflow automation and more like control theory.

If the agent can inspect or mutate the enforcement layer, then the enforcement layer becomes part of the optimization surface. At that point you’re not solving drift, you’re creating an adversarial environment where the agent optimizes around constraints.

That suggests the real boundary isn’t logical separation, it’s capability isolation. The agent shouldn’t just fail validation, it shouldn’t even have the representational access required to reason about how validation works.

We’ve been experimenting with isolating enforcement in a separate execution layer with scoped pre-authorization for high-impact actions. When the agent can’t model the gate, routing-around behavior drops significantly, and drift shows up first in reservation or planning instability rather than surface output errors.

Still early exploration, but it’s becoming clear that “better prompting” is the least interesting part of this problem.