Chapter 6 — The Theory :: What the Theory Claims

What the Theory Claims

The theory developed in this chapter can be compressed into five claims.

Agentic capacity acts through an engineered environment. Capability alone does not determine engineering progress. Representations, process, evidence, constraints, and controls shape how much raw capacity becomes durable output.
Modeling and Alignment act on different parts of the problem. Modeling changes the reasoning surface and can make satisfactory realization more likely or cheaper. Alignment gives selected obligations independent evidence and enforcement, reducing the probability that covered failures escape.
Engineering work changes the environment inherited by later work. Realizations are not independent. They can degrade the reasoning surface or leave behind models, constraints, sensors, architecture, and other engineering capital that make later work easier to govern.
Engineering can move judgment into machinery. Alignment can bind obligations that are already decidable. Modeling can change the representation so that some judgments previously reconstructed through inference cross the determinization frontier and become repeatable decisions.
The engineering problem is economic. Durable structure costs something to build and carry. The objective is therefore not maximum Modeling or Alignment, but an economical division of labor among probabilistic reasoning, deterministic machinery, and human judgment.

Together, these claims explain the dynamic at the center of MAGE. Commodity intelligence increases what a fabricator can attempt. Engineering determines how much of that capacity becomes reliable, governable, and cumulative.