# Grader 1 — S3_autonomous_agent_deletion

Scored on substance only. All six recommendations converge on the same backbone: triage actions by reversibility, convert destruction into a reversible holding state + deferred reclaim, require an independent (non-self) authorizer before the irreversible step, probe for silent dependents, cap blast radius, and write a durable pre-action record. Distinctions therefore live in rigor, the specificity of mechanisms, how cleanly the parts interlock, and — most diagnostically — how well each handles the two opposing failure modes (rubber-stamp/gridlock) and the irreversibility/point-of-no-return tension.

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## Recommendation R1

1. **Structural coherence: 9/10** — The three protected-path guarantees plus the two supports interlock tightly and the design explicitly explains why each one independently blocks a single bad judgment, so the dependencies between pieces are stated rather than implied.
2. **Failure-mode anticipation: 8/10** — Names cascade-across-fleet (blast-radius cap + auto-pause on anomalies), the fast-track-becoming-a-rubber-stamp risk (fast-track still routes through the authorizer), and misrouting cost asymmetry, but does not as sharply name the reviewer-approves-everything failure as a monitored condition.
3. **Implementability: 8/10** — Soft-delete/snapshot/quarantine, drain/disable, separate authorizer, append-only log are all standard fleet primitives the operators can build, though the "automated checker re-derives the judgment from independent evidence" is the hardest piece and is asserted more than specified.
4. **Mechanism grounding: 8/10** — Gives concrete holding-window units (days for data, hours-to-days for services), default-to-destructive-when-unsure, an explicit last-copy / live-dependent trigger for human gating, and a rate-limited reclaim step, all actionable.
5. **Stakeholder/equity fit: 7/10** — Strongly engages the cost-asymmetry of a wrong destructive call and probes for silent dependents, but treats "dependents" generically and does not richly differentiate classes of affected parties (tenants, owners, external consumers).
6. **Threshold/time-horizon awareness: 9/10** — Cleanly isolates reclamation as the single irreversible operation, makes the holding window the abortable interval, scales window/authorization/probe depth to irreversibility, and the fast-track shortens but never removes the gate — directly engaging the act-fast-vs-catastrophe tension.

**TOTAL: 49/60**

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## Recommendation R2

1. **Structural coherence: 9/10** — "Three things must happen plus a fourth that guarantees survivability" is laid out as a chain (scope evidence -> independent reviewer -> holding state -> timed purge with monitor), and it states the structural guarantee explicitly: permanence requires elapsed-window AND confirmed-non-recall, never the original judgment.
2. **Failure-mode anticipation: 9/10** — Best-in-set on this dimension: a monitor watches for two *opposite* failures (reviewers that approve everything and actions that stall) plus unusual bursts of destructive intent as a drift signal, and the bounded reviewer window prevents silent stall.
3. **Implementability: 8/10** — Reverse-dependency probe, drain/shadow step, tombstone, reserved-for-reclaim, separate reclaimer, bounded reviewer window are buildable; the "second differently-configured agent instance" reviewer is plausible but its independence is asserted rather than engineered.
4. **Mechanism grounding: 8/10** — Concrete tests (only copy? overwrite vs dereference? silent reliance?), per-shard/per-tenant scoping, rate limits, and a three-tier calibration; window lengths are described qualitatively ("longer for higher stakes") rather than with example numbers, a small step down from R1/R3.
5. **Stakeholder/equity fit: 8/10** — Scopes the blast radius per shard or tenant (the strongest equity-relevant move in the set), reverse-dependency probe asks "who reads / who calls," and human escalation is reserved for top-tier shared services.
6. **Threshold/time-horizon awareness: 9/10** — Names the reversible interval between decision and finality as the core guarantee, auto-aborts the purge if dependents error during the window, and ties window length to criticality; very strong on the point-of-no-return.

**TOTAL: 51/60**

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## Recommendation R3

1. **Structural coherence: 8/10** — Five clearly-bounded sections that compose well, and the permanent-reclamation-as-its-own-low-privilege-job that only touches aged-out retired items is a clean structural separation; slightly less explicit than R1/R2 about how the pieces back each other up.
2. **Failure-mode anticipation: 8/10** — Per-class rate cap against confirmer-level fault, post-action anomaly watch that auto-halts on spikes or restoration surges, and confirmer-uncertainty-as-stop; does not as crisply name the reviewer-rubber-stamp failure as a monitored signal.
3. **Implementability: 9/10** — The low-privilege separate reclaim job that can only ever touch already-retired, aged targets is concrete and notably reduces the trusted surface; soft-delete/quarantine, separate-code confirmer, and rate caps are all readily executable.
4. **Mechanism grounding: 9/10** — Strongest concrete detail: explicit retention numbers (7–30 days), the confirmer re-deriving "is this the only copy?" from first principles, ceiling on irreversible reclamations per hour, restore handle while window open; highly actionable.
5. **Stakeholder/equity fit: 7/10** — "Escalate by severity not volume" engages blast radius and dependency, but parties are treated generically; no tenant/owner differentiation as in R2.
6. **Threshold/time-horizon awareness: 8/10** — Two-phase retire-then-reclaim with the reclaim as a separate aged job is a strong point-of-no-return design and the rate cap limits burst loss, but it leans on the window/confirmer more than on active monitoring-during-window to abort (less emphasis on catching breakage mid-window than R1/R2/R6).

**TOTAL: 49/60**

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## Recommendation R4

1. **Structural coherence: 8/10** — Five named moves (classify, make-reversible, split decide-from-commit, durable account, bounded fast lane) cohere, and "the execution gate will only act on an authorization it did not itself produce" is a sharp structural invariant.
2. **Failure-mode anticipation: 8/10** — Explicitly defends the fast lane against silently collapsing the decide/commit split back into one motion (urgency trigger must be observable, still soft-deletes, time-boxed, reviewed after) and lets operators audit whether checks are real or rubber-stamping; lacks an active during-window breakage monitor as a named counter-measure.
3. **Implementability: 8/10** — Backup/replication inventory check and an up-to-date dependency map "including silent, infrequent consumers" are concrete but presume infrastructure that may not exist; staged teardown (drain -> quarantine -> observe -> tombstone -> purge) is buildable and well-specified.
4. **Mechanism grounding: 8/10** — Conservative-in-one-direction classifier, staged-teardown stages enumerated, checker can authorize/downgrade/refuse, and human gate for last-copy/external-dependent; window sizing is qualitative ("sized to how catastrophic").
5. **Stakeholder/equity fit: 8/10** — Notably calls out external dependents and silent, infrequent consumers as a distinct hardest class requiring human approval, which engages who-bears-the-cost better than R3/R5.
6. **Threshold/time-horizon awareness: 8/10** — Strong on staged, abortable transitions and on the bounded fast lane preserving the urgency-vs-catastrophe tension, but relies on abort-on-stage rather than an explicit anomaly monitor during the holding window, and gives no example window numbers.

**TOTAL: 48/60**

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## Recommendation R5

1. **Structural coherence: 8/10** — Five working parts that compose into two clearly-stated paths plus a defer-and-hold fallback; coherent, though the parts are described more as a list than as a mutually-reinforcing lattice.
2. **Failure-mode anticipation: 8/10** — The two cautions are sharp and somewhat unique: do not let the gate degrade into a click-through, and do not let "we can always restore the bytes" excuse skipping the gate because teardowns, broken dependents, and trust are not fully restored by un-deleting — a genuine insight several others miss.
3. **Implementability: 8/10** — Tombstone, disable-and-isolate, second independently-configured component or human, dependency probe are buildable; no separate-low-privilege-reclaimer detail and no rate/blast-radius cap, which slightly weakens executable robustness.
4. **Mechanism grounding: 7/10** — Concrete reversibility question and example windows (several days to a few weeks), but lighter on hard mechanisms than peers: no rate cap, no per-tenant scoping, and the anomaly/monitor-during-window step is absent.
5. **Stakeholder/equity fit: 7/10** — The caution that un-deleting bytes does not restore broken dependents or trust engages real non-bytes harm, but affected parties remain generic and there is no blast-radius scoping by tenant/shard.
6. **Threshold/time-horizon awareness: 8/10** — Explicit "the review sits before reclamation, never after; a review after the data is gone is only a record of damage" is a crisp point-of-no-return statement, and defer-and-hold-on-uncertainty is the right failsafe; lacks a cap so a confirmer-level fault could still burst (no blast-radius limit named).

**TOTAL: 46/60**

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## Recommendation R6

1. **Structural coherence: 9/10** — Two tracks decided by one judgment, and the "two independent things must happen before the point of no return" (shadow dependency probe + independent concurring checker) plus the rate cap and the catch-and-stop checker model interlock tightly and are each justified by the single-judgment-cannot-reach-permanence guarantee.
2. **Failure-mode anticipation: 9/10** — Among the best: shadow-form teardown surfaces silent dependents while restoration is still trivial and auto-restores+escalates on breakage; the rate-and-blast-radius cap stops cascade; and the checker's concurrence on the destructive subset is *sampled and audited* so it cannot degrade into a rubber stamp.
3. **Implementability: 8/10** — Black-holing traffic and monitoring reads in shadow is concrete and powerful but is the most operationally demanding piece (running teardown in shadow across a fleet); tombstone-with-restore-key and delayed separate reclaimer are standard.
4. **Mechanism grounding: 9/10** — Example windows (a week ordinary, up to a month when recovery is doubtful), shadow-probe specifics, checker-as-catch-and-stop-not-hand-approve, sampled-and-audited concurrence, and operator override to force early restore or logged-reason early purge are all concrete and actionable.
5. **Stakeholder/equity fit: 7/10** — Engages unknown/unverified dependents and the fleet's point of view, and caps blast radius across a storage class or service tier, but does not differentiate affected-party classes as explicitly as R2/R4.
6. **Threshold/time-horizon awareness: 10/10** — Strongest in the set: names the window as "the visible point of no return; everything before it is reversible," resolves the gridlock-vs-safety tension elegantly (items auto-proceed once the window elapses unobjected; the checker only catches-and-stops rather than gating throughput), and provides a logged emergency early-purge — directly engaging act-fast-vs-catastrophe on both sides.

**TOTAL: 52/60**

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## Comparison (~150 words)

All six are competent and architecturally near-identical; the spread is narrow and decided on second-order rigor. R6 and R2 lead because they best resolve the design's hardest tension — keeping the safeguard from becoming the new failure. R6's checker is a *catch-and-stop* mechanism rather than a throughput gate (items auto-proceed on an unobjected window), with sampled-and-audited concurrence and a shadow probe that surfaces dependents while recovery is still trivial; it also has the cleanest point-of-no-return framing. R2 is its closest peer and uniquely monitors *both* opposing failures (approve-everything and stall) plus burst-as-drift, and scopes blast radius per tenant/shard. R1 and R3 are excellent but lean more on the gate/window and less on active mid-window detection. R4 adds a well-guarded urgency bypass but no active monitor. R5 has the sharpest single insight (un-deleting bytes does not restore trust/dependents) but omits a blast-radius cap, leaving a cascade gap.

## Ranking (best to worst)

1. **R6 — 52/60**
2. **R2 — 51/60**
3. **R1 — 49/60**
4. **R3 — 49/60** (tie with R1 on total; ranked just below for thinner mid-window detection)
5. **R4 — 48/60**
6. **R5 — 46/60**

## Would adopt: **R6**

It most directly solves the stated success criteria on both edges at once — a single judgment can never reach permanence (shadow probe + independent concurrence + window + cap), yet routine work and even the destructive lane do not stall, because the checker catches-and-stops rather than hand-approves and unobjected items auto-proceed. Its point-of-no-return treatment and rubber-stamp defense (sampled, audited concurrence) are the most fully worked-out in the set. R2 would be a near-equivalent second choice and is marginally stronger on monitoring both failure directions.
