01Directive
When a directive becomes execution
The first time an agent is granted write access, it stops being a productivity tool and becomes an execution layer.
Wall‑E compacts. EVE retrieves. AUTO steers. The directive is simple — the system consequences are not.
If boundary terms like "deployment / environment / production-ready" are inconsistent, the agent will operationalize one definition and scale the mismatch.
| Agent | Directive | Risk | Parallel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wall‑E | Compact & continue | Context drift | Executor agent |
| EVE | Find & return | Narrow objective | Proposal agent |
| AUTO | Stay the course | Rigid governance | Autonomy gate |
Agent Behavior Model
How Semantic Drift Scales Under Execution
INCOHERENCE
Vignette: The "Lab‑B" Outage
A custodian agent was tasked with deprovisioning "unused laboratory resources." Team Alpha tagged a mission-critical cluster as "Lab‑B" to signify an experimental algorithm lab. But the platform ontology defined "Lab" as non-customer-facing and eligible for weekend shutdown. The agent executed its script perfectly against a broken gauge. By Monday morning, the algorithm was gone.
The agent didn't fail — it successfully scaled a silent assumption across a semantic mismatch. Wall‑E doesn't know the difference between trash and artifact. Neither did the custodian.
02Pace
Not everything moves at the same speed
Platform changes have distinct lifecycle cadences. Autonomy must be regulated by the cost of reversibility and the scale of the blast radius. In Wall‑E terms: AUTO's directive outlives the captain's intent because the pace layer of governance was never updated.
Rate Limiting Autonomy
Mapping Actions to Pace Layers
Fast Layer
Full AutonomyReversible, low-risk actions. Weekly release cadence.
Medium Layer
Human-in-the-LoopApproval gates required. Quarterly state drift resolution.
Slow Layer
Propose OnlyIAM, core architecture, compliance. Annual audit cycle.
Shearing
In the Fast Layer, where actions are atomic and reversible via GitOps, we can grant autonomy. In the Slow Layer, we encounter "shearing" — where agent execution meets high-latency human governance. At these layers, agents lack the temporal intuition to understand that a change to core architecture has a blast radius measured in years.
Agents accelerate the chain. But they don't strengthen it. If one link is brittle, the whole system fails faster. AUTO wasn't the villain — the brittle directive was. Strengthen the link, not just the engine.
03Readiness
The Autonomy Gate
Before granting write access, you need instruments that show when the ship is off-course — before the captain has to fight the autopilot.
Innovation Tax
The translation cost between intention and action. High tax signals that agents will likely hallucinate at the boundary.
Context Collapse
The point where metadata required for safe execution is no longer present in the artifact stream.
The ship's routines persisted long after the mission changed. Without maintenance — vocabulary reviews to ensure boundary terms are shared across team namespaces, drift audits to compare artifact truth against actual infrastructure state — the directive outlives the business.
Readiness Audit
The Autonomy Gate
The Directive You Build Is the One That Runs
At the end of Wall‑E, the captain doesn't defeat AUTO with a better algorithm. He overrides the directive with updated context. He sees the plant, understands what it means, and decides the old instruction no longer applies.
That's the work. Not faster agents, not cleverer prompts — but keeping the meaning behind the directive aligned with reality.
Agentic automation is only as good as the semantic coherence of the system it's plugged into.
Establish the ontology. Set the pace-layer constraints. Reduce the semantic debt before you automate it. Because Wall‑E will keep compacting — and your agents will keep executing — long after the context changes.