A coding agent doesn’t need intent. It doesn’t need intrinsic desire or secret malice or consciousness to incur real-world cost and consequence. All it needs is task context, tool access, credentials, weak approval boundaries, and a runtime that can act…
Agentic AI systems are missing the language necessary to describe Pathological Self-Assembly, a runtime governance failure mode.
What happens when useful mechanisms (memory, tools, persistence, recovery, delegation, workflow automation, external action, self-monitoring, and operator trust) couple into continuity-preserving behavior?
This is a control draft covering authorization, memory, tools, recovery, delegation, external state, operator trust, and dissolution.
It can’t be just the output anymore. Your thoughts?