Control
Make authority, interfaces, state transitions, and consequential operations explicit and bounded.
Identification
Diagnostic questions
- Who or what is allowed to act?
- Through which interface?
- Which transition is being requested?
- What prevents an unintended fallback or a duplicated effect?
In practice
Project Feldspar is the clearest case: an agent workspace with real capability and no standing authority over consequential systems, with approval held in a different trust domain. Control Center gives each module a declared interface and grants only what that interface requires. docmend splits scan, plan, apply, verify, and restore so the consequential stage is opt-in rather than incidental.
Control is not the same as restriction. It is the difference between a system where authority is a named, inspectable thing and one where it is whatever happened to be in the environment.
Background threads
Procedural operation is control made routine: a specified action, a specified authority to perform it, and a specified way to confirm the plant is in the state the procedure assumes. The transferable habit is not ceremony. It is insisting that a consequential action has one defined path, and that the path is the same one every time.
Common failure
Authority by convenience. Everything runs with the credentials that were easiest to hand, so the blast radius of any mistake is the whole estate.