Patterns

The rules my systems keep reusing, each earned somewhere specific, each with its limits stated. Last updated August 22, 2026.

Authority

The house contract

The AI drafts; a human enacts. Drafting is autonomous and unlimited, action waits behind a gate only I can open (a button, a tap, an approval emoji). Use when: an agent's output can change the world outside its own files. Limit: applies to consequential actuation, not every model-assisted edit; a draft in a git branch needs a reviewer, not a ceremony. Earned in: the coach's rebuild, the watch button.

Propose, don't execute

The model returns a verdict or a proposal; plain, non-AI code maps it onto a short allowlist and does the touching. What executes is the literal rendered change, never the model's prose. Use when: the model's input includes text strangers can influence. Limit: the allowlist is the security boundary; a wide allowlist turns this back into direct execution with extra steps. Earned in: letting the on-call engineer act, the Gmail guardrail.

Earned autonomy

Agents start powerless and buy privileges with measured track records: shadow first, then advisory, then one narrow verb at a time, on a schedule of trust written down before the agent exists. Use when: an agent wants a new verb. Limit: this is the current policy, not a claim that every agent historically walked the full ladder; and a record only counts if something could have failed it. Earned in: the guardrail, the red pen's payoff.

Evaluation

Graders need graders

Every gate that scores an AI system gets audited by something that can fail it. Validation checks, referees, exams, and my own answer keys have each been caught wrong by the next grader up. Use when: a gate's verdict decides a promotion. Limit: the chain terminates at a human reading the actual cases; it's graders all the way up only until someone does the boring adjudication. Earned in: the red pen, the Bitter Lesson audit.

The red pen

Corrections are a curriculum. When I fix an agent's mistake in the tool where it happened, the fix gets banked and studied on a schedule, and the agent rewrites its own instructions from the pile. Use when: the same judgment call recurs enough to bank corrections against. Limit: only explicit corrections teach; silence teaches nothing, and unbanked fixes evaporate. Earned in: the colophon, the red pen post.

A configured control isn't a verified control

A gate you set up is not a gate you've checked. It can be configured exactly right and still sit off to the side of the path real traffic actually takes, so the only honest test is a probe from outside, along the route a stranger's request would follow, read from raw responses and redirects rather than a summary. Use when: any "is X reachable" or "is X protected" claim. Limit: an external probe proves one path at one moment, and caching or a trusted vantage can still lie, so record where the probe ran from. Earned in: the door I hadn't actually closed.

Operations

The fire marshal rule

Whatever watches a system must not live on it; the thing that must outlive a failure runs somewhere the failure can't reach. Use when: placing anything whose job is detecting that a host is down. Limit: the second machine is now its own thing to monitor; the rule relocates the single point of failure, it doesn't abolish it. Earned in: the on-call engineer.

Change management

One-way doors

Stay reversible as long as physically possible, and walk up to the point of no return slowly instead of stumbling through it. Use when: a step, once taken, cannot be untaken (data, hardware, public disclosure). Limit: most changes are two-way; giving every reversible change the one-way ceremony is how nothing ships. Earned in: the storage migration.

The melt check

Scaffolding that compensates for a model's limits gets tagged with the assumption it rests on, and every model upgrade re-tests those assumptions: whatever the new model matches bare, delete that day. Use when: a workaround exists because of what today's model can't do. Limit: values, world facts, and verification are not scaffolding and never melt; the tag distinguishes them. Earned in: the Bitter Lesson audit.

A pattern earns its place by surviving contact with at least one real system. When a post retires a pattern, this page says so.