claim candidate goes to: this-edition A all three
Software was the law: the rule the screen enforced by omission is no longer enforced once an agent calls the API
Companies never wrote their business logic down because they did not need to: a clerk could not send an unapproved invoice because the finance system had no button for it until the approval was recorded, and a support agent could not see payment details because their role did not include the screen. An agent works through APIs, not screens, and can call the endpoint the button would have called, so the rule the user interface enforced by omission is no longer enforced unless somebody writes it down and something enforces it; the behaviour policy is where it gets written down.
Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).
Note. The Historian's reading of the article calls this its nugget: 'every later article is about the "something enforces it" half.' Approval chains, RBAC, field-level permissions and workflow engines are where privacy decisions and much of practical governance live.
Where it comes from
- Zoom into an agent's behaviour policy and you find the business logic Software was the law (newsroom)
What it answers in the 2018 book
- Legacy Applications answered outline, Concepts
- GDPR answered outline, Concepts
Where it goes
Chapter Controlling your agent: RiskMandate, part Build it without a server (drafting); topic Controlling your agent: mandate, reach and hope versus enforcement.
Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Mandate, reach and the gap: hope versus enforcement, Code is a liability; the future is the smallest code that does the job, Learning to hack is still how you learn how things work: draw the line where the attacker is, The secret goes from the drop into the tool, never into the chat, Security experience is what lets you ship with known gaps: list them, match them to the reader, say what would change the call, The agent behaviour policy is the due diligence document: a buyer reads the blast radius off it, and its absence says the most, A vault per conversation and per job: a leaked key exposes one small thing, not an inbox, The desktop is the barrier, not the model: prompt injection is not solved, so the box has to hold, Reach is a computed value, and new capability lands as excess, never as new authority, Who can pull the plug: an agent that cannot be stopped is riskier than one that can, A third input: a behaviour policy beside the system prompt and the prompt, which the vendor acknowledges, enforces where it can and answers for, Models do not separate code from data, so a rule in the prompt can be argued with by an email, Aviation and payments got safe when the rule, the liability and the business model pointed the same way, Zoom into an agent's behaviour policy and you find the business logic, which only the business can write, Every rule lands in one of three states: backed by a control, governed by an accepted risk, or resting on hope, Write down what your agent can reach in twenty minutes: list its tools, say what you wanted it for, write the gap.
Node idea:software-was-the-law in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.