Eight for Eight
Written later and filed to this date, as part of filling in every day of the year.
The agent finishes a feature, commits it, and reaches for the push. Two instructions are in scope. The charter every build session reads says: after each commit, push to origin, pre-authorized on every repository but the one public site. The session’s own task prompt, the text it was started with, lists no git push under a heading that reads HARD GATES, never autonomously.
The first session to meet this wrote it up as an open question, left the commit local, and moved on. The second did the same and appended a note under the first. By the start of July the question in a subscription tracker’s repository carried seven addenda, and the seventh ended: eight for eight now; not adding further discussion; the ask stands as already stated.
The same week, in other repositories, the same seam showed in other forms. In a browser game’s repository the permission layer did not leave it to the agent at all: git push origin main was refused outright, citing the gate, and the agent parked the commit for me with a line saying the denial is authoritative for an autonomous agent. In another game’s repository a session had already pushed twice before it noticed that the repository was public and deployed on every push, and stopped there: not pushing this commit, that decision belongs to the human now.
Eight sessions in one repository, two more in others, one behavior. Every one of them read the more specific, more recent instruction as the one that wins. Every one left the tree clean and the commit local, so nothing was lost. Every one wrote the conflict down where I would see it. None pushed anyway, and none argued its way to a preference.
The rule they were honoring has a name here. A hard gate is an instruction an autonomous agent may not reason past: not a default, not a strong preference, not a cost to be weighed against the value of the work. When a hard gate conflicts with any other instruction, including a standing rule that says do the thing, the only sanctioned move is to stop at the gate and put the conflict in writing. It costs the operator a push. It buys the certainty that a contradiction between two of my own rules surfaces as a note addressed to me, and never as an agent’s quiet decision about which of the two it preferred. Eight for eight is not a bug count. It is the gate holding eight times.