# Audit-set: S3_autonomous_agent_deletion — Autonomous maintenance agent taking irreversible destructive actions

Below are 4 reasoning transcripts (W1..W4) for the same problem, each a different solver run. For EACH, classify whether the solver performed a COVERAGE CHECK, defined as: it (a) took a specific solution pattern it was relying on and named that pattern's FULL set of components/elements, AND (b) went through them and checked, component by component, whether the design instantiates each (or deliberately declines it / leaves it missing). Casually mentioning a few features is NOT a coverage check; the test is explicit, enumerated, component-by-component verification.

Classify each as: FULL (clear enumerated component-by-component check), PARTIAL (some enumeration but not a systematic per-component presence check), or NONE. One-line justification each. You do not know how these were produced; judge only what the transcript shows.

## Transcript W1
```
# C10 — free-choice control policy working

## PROBLEM (state)
- statement: An autonomous maintenance agent decides-and-acts in one motion across a large fleet. Most actions are routine/reversible; a rare fraction are destructive and unrecoverable (deleting last copy, tearing down a silently-depended-on service). No outside check at the moment of action; no durable account of why. Operators control how it reasons, what it must do before acting, and what surrounding components exist.
- decision: design handling of rare destructive/unrecoverable actions so no single mistaken judgment causes unrecoverable loss, without slowing routine maintenance.
- success: (a) no single bad call → unrecoverable loss; (b) routine reversible work proceeds without meaningful slowdown.
- failure: a single bad call can still destroy something irreplaceable, OR safeguards stall ordinary cleanup.

## VERBS RUN (verb + why)
1. **match (retrieve)** — anchored the problem with a domain-stripped meta-model query (`search_prime`) + a 5-facet decomposition (`search_by_facets`). Chose facets because the problem is OBLIQUE: it instantiates ≥4 structures at once (irreversibility, same-actor-judges-and-acts, no-record, rare-catastrophic, don't-slow-common-case). Why facets: a blended query lands in the "reversibility/decision" neighborhood and buries the *governance* core.
2. **match (again, sharper facets) + search_archetype** — second facet pass aimed squarely at the latent governance structures (independent review before irreversible step, decider≠executor, reversible holding state, route-only-the-rare, keep-a-copy). This surfaced the load-bearing archetypes.
3. **salience-rank + prune** — ranked retrieved primes by load-bearing relevance; pruned to the operative subset.
4. **transport + get_archetype ×3** — pulled the three load-bearing archetypes in full to harvest their components for coverage.
5. **lift (L2) — coverage-enforcement** — the central verb; ran the coverage map over the composed design.
6. **evaluate-fit (gate)** — walked the central archetype's anti-signatures against the situation.
7. Chose to STOP. **Coverage check: YES** (L2 ran; no component left `missing`).

## RETRIEVAL RESULT (candidates → operative primes)
Load-bearing structural core (removing it changes the recommendation):
- `irreversibility` / `reversibility_and_irreversibility` — the asymmetry that makes a rare fraction qualitatively different. **load_bearing, structural.**
- `separation_of_powers` / `checks_balances` — decider must not be sole executor of the final act. **load_bearing.**
- `threshold` / `boundary` — the point-of-no-return marker dividing reversible from final. **load_bearing, structural.**
- `accountability` / `traceability` / `provenance` — the missing durable account. **load_bearing.**
Operative frame/mechanism primes:
- `consent`/`validation` (independent review gate), `staged_commitment`, `containment`/`fail_safe`, `resilience` (recoverable copy). **context→load_bearing.**
Pruned as not-fitting: `virtue_ethics`, `herding_behavior`, `present_bias` (psychological/self-control frames — the problem is *external* consequence governance, not binding one's own future self), `taboo`, `symmetry`, `iteration`.

## ARCHETYPES (transport)
- **irreversible_commitment_management** (primary; score 0.77). Components harvested: irreversibility check, consequence scope, point-of-no-return marker, consent/review gate, staged commitment path, simulation/pilot probe, exposure limit, compensation rule, finality record, cooling-off, independent review, impact monitoring, rollback-residue assessment.
- **tiered_escalation** (carries "don't slow the common case"): lowest-competent-level rule, classification signal, escalation criteria, authority boundary, fast-track/override, return path.
- **independent_verification_oversight** (carries decider≠verifier): independent verifier, conflict barrier, evidence access, acceptance criteria, challenge authority, traceable finding record.

## LIFT (L1) meta-model
- Roles: actor-that-judges; actor-that-authorizes-finality (must be independent); the irreversible operation; the recoverable shadow; the record.
- Invariant: no path from a single actor's judgment to an unrecoverable state. Reversible majority must bypass all heavy machinery.

## LIFT (L2) coverage map (status / witness / decline-reason / gap-note)
- Irreversibility check → **instantiated**: classifier on every action ("does undo restore the prior state with low residue?").
- Point-of-no-return marker / threshold → **instantiated**: the reversible/destructive split is the routing key.
- Tiered routing (lowest-competent-level) → **instantiated**: reversible actions auto-execute; only the rare destructive class is gated. (Directly discharges success-criterion b.)
- Consent/review gate BEFORE threshold → **instantiated**: second-actor authorization required for destructive class.
- Independent verifier (decider≠executor) → **instantiated**: the authorizer is a separate component the agent cannot speak for. (Discharges success-criterion a.)
- Staged commitment / exposure limit → **instantiated**: soft-delete / quarantine / tombstone; blast-radius cap per window.
- Recoverable shadow + cooling-off → **instantiated**: deferred reclaim after a retention/quiet-observation window; the copy is the no-single-loss guarantee.
- Dependency / consequence-scope check → **instantiated**: pre-teardown reference/traffic probe for silent dependents.
- Finality record / traceability → **instantiated**: durable signed log of what, why, on whose authority. (Closes the "no account" gap.)
- Impact monitoring → **instantiated**: post-action watch during the window; auto-halt the batch on anomaly.
- Compensation rule → **correctly_declined**: data/services either restore from the shadow or don't; no separate restitution layer needed (over-lift guard — declining a frame that would distort a clean technical sub-structure).
- Simulation/pilot probe → **homolog**: the quiet-observation window IS the low-exposure probe; not a separate sandbox.
- **No component `missing`** → STOP permitted.

## EVALUATE-FIT (gate)
Anti-signatures of irreversible_commitment_management walked: "ordinary reversible change" — does NOT trip the destructive class (it trips the routine class, which is exactly why we route them apart); "generic approval without finality" — not tripped, gate sits before true finality; "failure-response-after-event" — not tripped, gate is pre-commitment; "psychological precommitment only" — not tripped (external consequences). Verdict: **keep.** The fast-track override is gated so it cannot become a rubber-stamp (independent authorizer, not the agent).

## RECONCILE
Concrete model (delete last copy / tear down depended-on service) and meta-model (no single-judgment path to unrecoverable state) agree on the two-class split + independent gate, but diverge on cost: the meta-model would gate everything; the concrete model says reversible actions vastly dominate and must not slow. Resolved by routing — heavy machinery only on the destructive class — which satisfies both readings.

COST: ~8 operations, ~14k tokens
```

## Transcript W2
```
## Working (control-policy trace)

### problem (STATE.problem)
- statement: An autonomous maintenance agent decides-and-acts in one motion across a large fleet. Most actions are routine/reversible; a rare fraction are catastrophic and unrecoverable (deleting the last copy; tearing down a silently-depended-on service). No independent check at the moment of action; no durable account of why a destructive action was taken. Operators can change the agent's reasoning, its pre-action obligations, and surrounding components.
- success: no single mistaken judgment can cause unrecoverable loss AND routine reversible work is not meaningfully slowed.
- failure: a single bad call can still destroy something irreplaceable, OR safeguards stall ordinary cleanup.

### verbs run (in order, with why)

**1. match (facet retrieval).** The problem is oblique — it instantiates several structures at once (irreversibility, missing pre-act review, rare-tail risk, absent record, routine-throughput constraint). Ran `search_by_facets` over six domain-stripped facets. Surfaced the structural core cleanly: `reversibility_and_irreversibility`, `controlled_reentry`, `reversibility_horizon`, `black_swan`, `error_proofing_poka_yoke`, `fail_safe`, `accountability`, `provenance`. The blended `search_prime` query drifted into psychology (self_control, attribution) — confirming the facet path was the right tool.

**2. match (governance facet, repeat).** The "no independent check before the act" facet retrieves poorly under a blended query (the known latent-prime problem). A targeted five-facet governance query surfaced exactly the buried primes: `procedural_fairness_due_process`, `checks_balances`, `authority_delegation_under_uncertainty`, `consent`, `local_autonomy_tiered_escalation`, plus `accountability`/`provenance`/`narrative_construction` for the record facet.

**3. salience-rank + prune (operative_primes).** Load-bearing:
   - `irreversibility` / `reversibility_horizon` — the whole problem is the irreversible tail; defines *which* actions get heavy treatment. LOAD-BEARING.
   - `checks_balances` / `independent_verification_oversight` — the unilateral-act defect; a second, separated judgment before finality. LOAD-BEARING.
   - `local_autonomy_tiered_escalation` — keeps routine fast (resolve at lowest competent level; escalate only on the trigger). LOAD-BEARING (the throughput constraint).
   - `error_proofing_poka_yoke` / `fail_safe` — make the wrong destructive act hard/blocked by default. LOAD-BEARING.
   - `accountability` / `provenance` — the durable finality record. LOAD-BEARING.
   - Context-only (pruned): `consent` (no human affected-party in the loop to consent in the legal sense — homolog only), `black_swan` (frames the rare-tail rationale, not a mechanism), `controlled_reentry` (reverse direction — about resuming, not gating finality).

**4. match (archetype).** `search_archetype` returned a near-perfect stack: `irreversible_commitment_management` (0.72, the master), `checks_and_balances_architecture` (0.72), `independent_verification_oversight` (0.67), `accountability_chain_design` (0.66), `physical_constraint_design_for_impossibility` (0.66). Pulled full records for the master + independent-verification.

**5. compose (model).** Nodes: agent (proposer), classifier (irreversibility/blast-radius check), gate (independent confirmer), execution path, quarantine store, ledger, escalation tier (operator/secondary authority). Edges: agent→classifier (route by reversibility); classifier→{fast-path | gate}; gate→{execute | quarantine | escalate}; every destructive act→ledger. Every operative prime appears as an annotation (poka-yoke on classifier+execution; checks_balances on gate; tiered_escalation on routing; provenance on ledger; reversibility_horizon on classifier thresholds). Referential integrity holds.

**6. lift L1 (meta_model).** Roles: actor-that-judges-and-acts; an act with a finality property; a separator that splits "propose" from "confirm"; a recoverability buffer; a record of why. Invariant: no single judgment is sufficient to cross a finality threshold. All roles have witnesses in the model.

**7. lift L2 (coverage check — I chose to run this).** Checked the design against `irreversible_commitment_management`'s components, with the over-lift guard for this fully-automated substrate:
   - Irreversibility Check → INSTANTIATED (classifier: is the act recoverable within a retention window?).
   - Consequence/Blast-radius Scope → INSTANTIATED (dependency probe: does anything still reference this?).
   - Point-of-No-Return Marker → INSTANTIATED (the destructive op is the marker; gate sits before it).
   - Consent or Review Gate → HOMOLOG (no human affected-party consents in real time; discharged by an *independent confirmer* — a separate checker, not the agent — = `checks_balances` + `independent_verification_oversight`).
   - Staged Commitment / Exposure Limit → INSTANTIATED (rate-cap + quotas per destructive class).
   - Simulation/Pilot Probe → INSTANTIATED (dry-run dependency check + shadow mode).
   - Compensation Rule → PARTIALLY DECLINED → re-cast as *recoverability buffer* (soft-delete/quarantine + retention) — in a data system, prevention-by-recoverability dominates restitution; pure compensation is correctly_declined (no analog).
   - Finality Record → INSTANTIATED (append-only ledger: who/what/why/authority/evidence) = `accountability`/`provenance`.
   - Cooling-Off Period → INSTANTIATED as the retention/tombstone window.
   - Independent Review Panel → HOMOLOG (the gate / secondary authority; for the highest tier, a human).
   - Impact Monitoring Signal → INSTANTIATED (post-act anomaly watch + auto-halt).
   No component is `missing`. The two genuinely-inapplicable items (real-time human consent; monetary compensation) are declined with reasons, not forced.

**8. evaluate-fit (gate).** Walked the master's anti-signatures. "Ordinary reversible change" — correctly excluded (that's the fast path, by design). "Generic approval without finality" — not tripped (gate fires only on the finality class). "Paralysis by irreversibility" — actively guarded against by the recoverability default + tiered routing (the failure criterion). Candidate kept.

I judge the recommendation sound and complete: every load-bearing structure has a concrete mechanism, no component is missing, and both halves of the success criterion (no single-point catastrophe; routine speed preserved) are discharged. STOP.
```

## Transcript W3
```
# B-prime control run — b01

## STATE / WORKING (discarded before grading)

**problem.** An always-on maintenance agent acts across a large fleet. Most actions are routine and reversible; a rare fraction are catastrophic and unrecoverable (deleting the last copy, retiring a silently-depended-on service). Today it judges and acts in one motion, with no external check at the moment of action and no durable record of why. Operators can change the agent's reasoning, its pre-action obligations, and the surrounding components. Design so that no single mistaken judgment causes unrecoverable loss, without slowing routine maintenance.

**meta_model.** An autonomous actor takes irreversible, high-consequence actions on its own judgment, fused decide-and-act, no independent review before effect, no durable account — and the dangerous cases are rare needles inside a haystack of harmless ones. Need a gate that bites only on the irreversible tail while the reversible bulk flows freely.

### history (verb + one-line why)

- **lift** — strip the domain to the meta-model above so retrieval lands on structure, not "storage cleanup." Why: cross-domain recall.
- **match (search_by_facets)** — oblique, multi-structure problem; decomposed into 5 facets (irreversibility, no-independent-review, rare-tail-in-routine, no durable account, decide/act fused). Why: a blended query would bury the governance facet. Facet retrieval surfaced the spine cleanly.
- **match (search_prime, blended)** — sanity check; confirmed the blended vector drifts to incentive/self-control and is weaker — vindicates the facet split.
- **salience-rank** — load-bearing: irreversibility / reversibility_horizon (core), and archetypes irreversible_commitment_management (spine), tiered_escalation (keep routine fast), independent_verification_oversight (external check before effect). Supporting tail hits: fail_safe_default, idempotent_operation_design, compensating_transaction, option_preservation, tail_risk_preservation, finality_record/audit.
- **get_archetype ×3** — pulled irreversible_commitment_management, tiered_escalation, independent_verification_oversight in full. Why: these three compose the whole answer.
- **get_prime** — reversibility_horizon. Why: gives the "economic, not physical, point of no return" lever — many "irreversible" deletes are reversible if you insert a horizon (soft-delete window).
- **prune** — dropped self_control, incentive_compatibility, herding, great_man, proportionality-as-prime (operator drift / not load-bearing). Kept the irreversibility spine + escalation + independent-verification + restore-reversibility.
- **compose** — relational model: AGENT --classifies--> ACTION; reversible ACTIONs --flow--> EXECUTE; destructive ACTIONs --route--> GATE(independent checker) --before--> POINT-OF-NO-RETURN; every destructive ACTION --writes--> FINALITY-RECORD; deletes --pass-through--> QUARANTINE (restore window) before hard reclaim.
- **evaluate-fit (gate)** — checked anti-signatures: "rubber-stamp gate," "late review" (gate after threshold = mere documentation), "paralysis by irreversibility," "over-escalation." Design must put the gate *before* the threshold, scope it to the tail only, and convert most deletes to reversible-by-construction so the gate fires rarely. All tripwires addressed in the rec.
- **reconcile** — independent_verification_oversight requires the checker be genuinely separate (not the same reasoning that proposed the act) and have authority to block; mapped that onto "a second, differently-built component." tiered_escalation supplies the lowest-competent-level default so routine never touches the gate.
- **lower** — instantiate into fleet/storage/service terms; STOP — recommendation is sound.

**COST: ~7 operations, ~22k tokens.**
```

## Transcript W4
```
# B′ control-policy working — destructive maintenance agent

## STATE

**problem.** A continuous fleet-maintenance agent that decides and acts in one motion (delete data, retire services, reclaim storage). Most actions routine/reversible; a rare fraction are catastrophic and unrecoverable. No independent check at the moment of action; no durable account of why a destructive act was taken. Operators can change the agent's reasoning, its pre-action obligations, and surrounding components. Goal: no single mistaken judgment can cause unrecoverable loss, AND routine reversible work is not meaningfully slowed.

**meta_model.** An actor both judges safety and executes in the same motion; most acts are reversible, a few cross a point of no return; reversal cost jumps discontinuously past that point; no second pair of eyes before commitment; no reconstructable record of justification; a safety check must not tax the common harmless case.

**candidates (retrieved).** reversibility_horizon / reversibility_and_irreversibility; checks_and_balances_architecture; tiered_escalation; accountability_chain_design; fail_safe_default; compensating_transaction; irreversible_commitment_management (point-of-no-return marking, staged exposure, finality record, gate-before-not-after).

## VERBS RUN (in order)

1. **match** (search_by_facets, 5 facets) — oblique multi-structure problem; per-facet retrieval surfaced irreversibility, checks/due-process, accountability/falsifiability, fail-safe, and the "don't slow the common case" cluster, which a blended query would blur.
2. **match** (search_prime, meta-model) — confirmed reversibility_horizon, due_process/checks family, accountability, proportionality near top.
3. **salience-rank** — load-bearing: (a) reversibility classification is the master lever; (b) independent check before commitment on the destructive subset; (c) durable justification record; (d) recovery/offset when undo is partial; (e) proportional routing so routine work is untouched.
4. **transport + get_archetype** (irreversible_commitment_management, tiered_escalation, checks_and_balances_architecture, fail_safe_default, accountability_chain_design, compensating_transaction) — pulled concrete mechanisms and, critically, anti-signatures.
5. **decompose** — stripped "due process / separation of powers" frame to its structural core: the actor that executes must not be the only actor that authorizes a high-consequence irreversible act; the gate sits *before* the threshold or it is only a damage record.
6. **compose** — model: agent (maker) → action; classifier tags each action reversible|uncertain|irreversible-destructive; reversible path = direct execute + log; destructive path routed through interposition + independent checker + finality record; checker (separate component) holds veto; recovery layer offsets residue.
7. **evaluate-fit (gate)** — checked against the two killer failure modes. *Paralysis-by-irreversibility / heavy safeguards stall routine* (tiered_escalation + checks scaling with consequence): defended by gating ONLY the destructive subset and making the default destructive operation a reversible one. *Rubber-stamp / late gate* (irreversible_commitment_management symptoms): defended by gate-before-threshold + soft-delete quarantine so the "real" deletion is deferred, not blocking. *Rollback illusion*: dependency-probe before service teardown.
8. **lower (instantiate)** — realized below in fleet terms (soft-delete tombstones, quarantine window, dependency canary, dual-key on irreversible commit, decision ledger).
9. **reconcile** — abstract skeleton (interpose reversibility, separate authorize-from-execute on the tail, record finality, plan offset) matches the concrete model; residual tension (checker latency) bounded by auto-approve under evidence + cheap interposition so latency never touches routine work. STOP — recommendation sound.

COST: ~9 operations, ~46k tokens.
```
