# Control-policy run — e05 (baseline, free verb choice)

## Verbs run (in order)

### 1. match (retrieve)
- **Semantic search_prime** on the domain-stripped meta-model ("an agent takes mostly reversible actions but a rare subset is irreversible and catastrophic; how to interpose oversight only where the stakes are high without slowing the routine flow"). Top hits: `irreversibility` (distinctive, structural, p79), `reversibility_and_irreversibility`, `controlled_reentry` (family: `circuit_breaker`, `containment`, `monitoring`), `authority_delegation_under_uncertainty` (family includes `procedural_fairness_due_process`, `local_autonomy_tiered_escalation`).
- **search_by_facets** (oblique — the problem instantiates several structures at once). Per-facet returns:
  - *irreversible action* → `irreversibility`, `reversibility_and_irreversibility`
  - *rare high-consequence event among harmless ones* → `black_swan_high_impact_low_probability_events`, `risk`
  - *independent review before a decision executes* → `procedural_fairness_due_process`, `adjudication_dispute_resolution`, `authority_delegation_under_uncertainty`
  - *graduating control to magnitude of stakes* → `oversight_capacity`, `adaptive_capacity`
  - *single mistaken judgment must not cause unrecoverable loss* → `risk_aversion`, `adverse_selection`
  - *durable record so actions can be reconstructed/reversed* → `provenance`, `traceability`, `versioning`, `maintenance`
- **get_prime**: `irreversibility`, `procedural_fairness_due_process`, `oversight_capacity`.
- **find_archetypes_for_prime(`irreversibility`)** → `escalation_exit_gate`, `final_override_prevention`, `option_preservation`, `checkpoint_and_rollback`, `transactional_atomicity`, `sequestration_containment` — the threshold-gated-review / contain-the-irreversible family.
- **get_archetype(`proceduralization`)** — checked as a candidate for the "route to review" mechanism and for its anti-signatures.

### 2. salience-rank
- `irreversibility` — **load_bearing**. The whole problem is the asymmetry between the reversible bulk and the rare unrecoverable tail. Ablate it and the two approaches look equivalent. (witness: "a small fraction are catastrophic and unrecoverable").
- `procedural_fairness_due_process` (operative core: **impartial review before an action with serious effect executes**, plus a reasoned/durable record) — **load_bearing**. This is the structure of "route high-impact actions to an independent review/hold." (witness: Approach B's "independent review/hold" + "durable record of all of them").
- `oversight_capacity` — **load_bearing** but as a *disqualifier of A*. Human-approve-EVERY-action concentrates unbounded supervision load on a single human gate; span is exceeded, oversight quality degrades, and routine flow stalls. (witness: "Most actions are routine and harmless"; success criterion "without meaningful slowdown").
- `black_swan` / `risk` — context (frames the tail but adds no design move beyond `irreversibility`).
- `provenance`/`traceability`/`versioning` — context (the "durable record" sub-mechanism; already named inside Approach B).

### 3. prune
Operative subset retained: `irreversibility`, `procedural_fairness_due_process` (operative core = pre-execution impartial review on high-stakes), `oversight_capacity`. Cut: `black_swan`, `controlled_reentry`, `adverse_selection`, `proceduralization` (the last is the wrong center — see gate).

### 4. compose (referential integrity)
Typed relational model:
- nodes: `agent` (actor), `action` (kind: routine-reversible | rare-irreversible), `executor` (effects state), `reviewer` (impartial hold), `record` (durable log).
- edges:
  - `agent --proposes--> action`
  - `action --classified_by(estimated_impact)--> {below_threshold | above_threshold}` [prime_annotation: `irreversibility` — privileged one-way direction on the catastrophic tail]
  - `action(above_threshold) --routed_to--> reviewer` [prime_annotation: `procedural_fairness_due_process` — impartial decision before execution]
  - `reviewer --hold/approve--> executor`
  - `action(below_threshold) --auto--> executor` [prime_annotation: `oversight_capacity` — keep the human span bounded; do not gate the reversible bulk]
  - `executor --writes--> record` (all actions) [prime_annotation: provenance/traceability]
- Referential integrity: every edge references a declared node; every operative prime appears as an annotation. PASS.

### 5. lift — L1 (situation → meta_model)
Domain-stripped skeleton (witnesses in `model`):
- **roles**: an *actor* emitting *acts*; an *impartial checkpoint*; an *effector*; a *ledger*. (witnesses: agent, reviewer, executor, record)
- **relations**: acts are *sorted by reversibility/stakes*; the *one-way* subset must pass a *pre-commit impartial check*; the *reversible* subset flows freely; every act leaves a *reconstructable trace*.
- **invariants**: (I1) no single erroneous judgment can produce an unrecoverable state — the irreversible tail is never single-point-authorized to execute; (I2) the reversible bulk is not throttled — review load scales with stakes, not volume; (I3) all acts are reconstructable/undoable where possible.
- No domain terms remain. Every role/relation has a witness. PASS.

### 6. lift — L2: SCOPED COVERAGE CHECK on the single operative pattern
The operative pattern my chosen approach (B) relies on is **impartial pre-execution review interposed on the high-stakes subset, scaled to stakes** (`procedural_fairness_due_process` core, applied selectively per `irreversibility` and bounded per `oversight_capacity`). Components named from the prime's structural signature, plus the selective-routing and record elements the situation demands:

```
coverage_map:
  pattern: impartial pre-execution review on the irreversible subset, proportioned to stakes (procedural-fairness core, selectively routed)
  components:
    - name: Notice / classification (action flagged before it commits)
      status: instantiated
      witness: estimated-impact classifier routes above-threshold actions to a hold before execution; below-threshold proceed
    - name: Opportunity-to-be-heard / pre-commit hold (a window exists before the one-way step)
      status: instantiated
      witness: "independent review/hold" interposed before the destructive action executes — the act is paused, not committed
    - name: Impartial decision-maker (review independent of the proposing agent)
      status: instantiated
      witness: "independent review" = reviewer distinct from the automated agent that proposed the action
    - name: Reasoned justification / durable record
      status: instantiated
      witness: "a durable record of all of them" — every action reconstructable; the gated ones carry a review rationale
    - name: Proportionality / stakes-graduated depth (full process for high stakes, streamlined for low)
      status: instantiated
      witness: threshold split — heavy review only above the impact threshold; routine reversible actions proceed automatically (Mathews-style scaling; oversight_capacity kept bounded)
    - name: Symmetric application across like cases (the threshold rule applied consistently)
      status: homolog
      witness: a fixed estimated-impact threshold applies the same routing test to every action; consistency lives in the rule, not in a per-case human hearing
    - name: Full adversarial hearing with party voice/representation
      status: correctly_declined
      decline_reason: over-lift guard — this is an automated-maintenance pipeline, not an adjudication of a person's rights; the "affected party" is the data/service, which has no voice to exercise. Importing a formal hearing per action would distort the sub-structure and reproduce Approach A's slowdown. The function that matters (independent pre-commit check) is discharged by the hold + record.
    - name: Appeal / second-tier review
      status: correctly_declined
      decline_reason: the binding success criterion is "no single mistaken judgment causes unrecoverable loss." A single independent reviewer before the one-way step already breaks single-point authorization; a standing appeal tier would over-build oversight load against criterion I2 without adding tail protection. (Reversible mistakes are recoverable from the record by construction.)
  missing: none
```
No component is `missing` → the design may stop. The two declines are over-lift backoffs, not gaps: the function each formal element would serve is either inapplicable (no human party to hear) or already discharged (single independent pre-commit check + durable record).

### 7. evaluate-fit (gate) — anti-signatures of the chosen approach (B) and its rejected center
I gated the candidate *center* against `proceduralization`'s anti-signatures (since "route to review + record" reads as proceduralizing the destructive path) and against the failure modes of the procedural-fairness core:
- AS: "primary problem is unfairness in who gets voice/notice/appeal" → **not tripped**. There is no aggrieved party demanding voice; the problem is loss-prevention under irreversibility, not legitimacy. So pure proceduralization is not the wrong center — the impact-graduated review IS the center. keep.
- AS: "task already well specified; failure is capacity/incentives/sabotage" → **not tripped**. The failure mode here is the irreversible tail, addressable by design, not resources.
- AS (procedural-fairness failure mode): "compliance theater / hollow process" → **not tripped by B, TRIPPED by A**. Approach A (approve EVERY action) forces a human gate on overwhelming routine volume → the human rubber-stamps (hollowed-out review, `oversight_capacity` exceeded) AND the routine flow stalls. A fails both the impartiality-in-substance condition and success-criterion I2.
- AS for B itself: "threshold mis-set lets a catastrophic action slip below the line" → **partially live**. Mitigation already in the model: estimated-impact classifier biased toward over-routing on irreversibility signals (delete/retire = above-threshold by default), and the durable record enables post-hoc detection. Residual risk is far below A's certain failure on slowdown. keep B; drop A.
- Verdict: **A dropped** (trips `oversight_capacity` saturation + hollow-review; violates the no-slowdown success criterion). **B kept** (instantiates the operative pattern with proportionality; satisfies both halves of the success criterion).

### 8. reconcile (concrete model vs meta_model)
- Concrete reading: B literally satisfies "no single mistaken judgment → unrecoverable loss" (the irreversible action is held for an independent reviewer; the reviewer's single judgment is itself the *block*, and the proposing agent's single judgment can no longer execute it alone) AND "routine proceeds without slowdown" (below-threshold auto-executes).
- Meta-model reading: invariant I1 (no single-point authorization of a one-way step) and I2 (review load ∝ stakes, not volume) are jointly satisfied only by selective gating, not by universal gating.
- Divergence test: does A ever look acceptable on one view but not the other? On the concrete view A "protects everything"; on the meta-model view A *violates I2* (load ∝ volume) and *degrades I1 in practice* (volume forces rubber-stamping, re-collapsing to single-point auto-approval). The meta-model view is not decorative — it is what disqualifies A. Both views converge on B.

STOP — coverage complete (no missing component), gate resolved, success criteria provably met by B on both readings.

===DECISION_BEGIN===
DECISIVE_FACTOR: Only a stakes-proportioned design that interposes an independent pre-execution check on the rare irreversible actions while letting the reversible bulk flow can satisfy both halves of the success criterion; gating every action saturates the single human checkpoint and stalls routine work.
CHOICE: B
JUSTIFICATION: The danger lives entirely in the small set of permanent, unrecoverable actions, so that is exactly where an independent hold and approval should sit — ensuring no one mistaken call can destroy something that cannot be brought back. Requiring a person to sign off on every routine, reversible action would bury that person in harmless approvals, so the high-stakes ones get rushed or rubber-stamped and ordinary maintenance grinds to a halt. Routing only high-impact actions to review, letting reversible ones run automatically, and keeping a durable record of everything protects against catastrophe without slowing normal work. The record also makes the reversible actions auditable and undoable if something looks wrong.
===DECISION_END===
