Guardrails
Rules a team cannot remove and an agent cannot argue with.
Write a rule on Monday. Read on Friday what it would have refused that week, then enforce it. Every refusal names the rule, the fact it matched and who to ask.
Why guardrails
Policy that holds when the work moves faster.
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Our rules live in a document agents never read.
Two approvals before production is a sentence on a wiki. Nothing stops the run that skips it.
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Teams remove the check that slows them down.
A required security step disappears from a pipeline, and we learn about it in the audit.
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Nobody can say why something was blocked.
A developer is refused, opens three logs and asks in a channel. The answer takes a day.
How it works
One catalogue of facts, every point of enforcement.
Rules over shared facts
A rule names where it applies, conditions over one shared predicate catalogue, and one effect from a closed list. There is no allow. Every rule runs in shadow first.
- Enforced at run, step, approval, publish and deployment
- Deny, require an approval, a step or evidence, restrict the executor
- Locked steps injected into every flow the rule governs
Change risk from named rules
Change risk is the highest answer of named rules, never a score, and it says why. Verification profiles pick the checks each class of risk must pass.
- Your pipeline's jobs mapped to checks, for the exact commit
- Architecture, interface and migration checks on the runner
- SBOMs and provenance statements bound to their artifact
Your engine, your exceptions
Bring OPA, Cedar or another decision point as a capability that can only tighten a decision. Exceptions are asked for, approved by a named person, and expire.
- Every evaluation recorded as a decision
- Why this was refused, answered in one request
- An exception ends on its expiry date
Try a rule
Test a rule before it is enforced.
Describe a change and watch three rules from one catalogue of facts decide it. In shadow nothing is blocked: the decision says what would have happened, and it is recorded.
Questions about guardrails
Can a team switch off a guardrail it dislikes?
Will a new rule block work the day we write it?
Can an agent talk its way past a rule?
Where are rules evaluated, and who decides the exceptions?
Design how your company ships software.
Start with a thirty-day shadow pilot on one Area: connect, observe, read the report together, decide.