Separation of Duties

A real agent can work in a clean worktree without a signing key. See the delegation boundary that yields a candidate, never a self-issued PASS.

If your agent can author its own success, your checks are decoration. Learn the structural split that keeps a harness from grading itself.

Stop an agent from approving evidence it produced. The separation-of-duties rule that still matters when models improve.

A signature can prove who made a record, not whether the policy deciding it came from a trusted committed state.

Better models don’t remove the need to bound an agent’s authority: they increase it. The case for treating AI as delegated labour that needs an accountability apparatus outside itself.