The Portable Moves

The portable moves

Strip away DocAble, the companion repository, and the current generation of agent harnesses, and a small set of moves remains. These are the parts of the method meant to port.

Five such moves remain, and each can transfer to a system with different tools, a different harness, and different names.

Choose the reduction that makes the engineering question answerable without carrying unnecessary detail. Do not model the whole system because a model sounds sophisticated. Identify the recurring question, externalize enough structure to answer it without reconstructing the implementation, and stop when additional detail no longer pays.

Place enforcement at the earliest boundary where the obligation is legible and decidable. Guidance can aim an agent before that point; local controls can sometimes act without a rich system model. Enforce an obligation only where the environment has the semantics and evidence needed to decide it.

Audit → Drain → Promote when introducing a future blocking obligation into an inherited system. A rule worth enforcing tomorrow may be violated everywhere today. Observe first, repair the inherited findings under evidence, then promote the mechanism to blocking once the governed surface can satisfy the rule without breaking work in flight. The final enforcing mechanism may be the original detector or a narrower mechanism revealed by the drain.

Generate evidence capable of falsifying the claim. For consequential work, do not rely on the producing agent's report alone. Choose an oracle appropriate to the obligation, search beyond the examples already known, and ask whether the search actually reached the semantic region the claim covers. Size delegated work so its result forms a meaningful unit of evidence.

Convert recurring judgment into durable engineering structure. Preserve the representations, knowledge, examples, procedures, tools, and context that make recurring judgments better. Enforce stable obligations where feasible through constraints, validators, permissions, gates, or other appropriate mechanisms. As experience makes previously qualitative obligations clearer or more evaluable, reconsider whether stronger enforcement has become feasible. Preserve residual judgment as a skill, runbook, or other reusable asset rather than forcing it into a mechanism that cannot honestly decide it. Maintain the resulting structure while its avoided reasoning and failure cost exceeds its carrying cost.

The method itself can become such an asset. Self-governance packages MAGE's recurring distinctions and procedures so that an agent can help identify models and obligations, decide where enforcement is feasible, choose candidate mechanisms, and build the surrounding engineering structure. The same pattern can package other domains whose recurring judgments benefit from explicit representations, procedures, tools, and evidence. See Appendix E for the concrete self-governance skill.

Those five moves are MAGE without its case. Appendix D collects them as bench procedures. Part V turns from method to evidence: what happened when this cycle met a system being built faster than its engineered environment could initially absorb.