Nobody hands you evidence about which agent-governance mechanisms actually change behaviour, so I ran the experiment deliberately on my own fleet: ship the candidate gates, measure each against behaviour, keep what proves itself, delete what does not, publish the ledger either way. I expected most of it to survive; it did not: 1,908 lines of advisory hooks retired by a live A/B, a retired synchronizer's zombie that ran CI red for six straight weeks, a hook deprecated within seventy-two hours of promotion. What survived obeys one selection rule: bind to a named enforcer with a planted-violation proof, or expire. The note is the results, the rule, the self-hosted code-review daemon earning its life on a real yield ledger, and, because every claim in this series ships with a re-read date, the audit of the previous note's claim: ratified by four more unattended cycles, twice qualified, one break found while writing.
Read the note ›Applied Intelligence is an independent practitioner publication. Each note takes one piece of real engineering, an agent, an adapter, a gateway, a gate, and reports what held and what did not, with the magnitudes kept honest and the structural claims stated so another team can re-derive them.
The register is deliberate: calm on the surface, hard engineering underneath. A finding leads; the evidence follows; the method and the limits sit where a reader can check them. The companion repositories are artefacts, one click away, never decoration: sdlc-dial-adapter and agentic-memory-mcp.
Written by Arseny Gorokh. The notes draw on real systems and name the public platforms they study; all client-specific material is excluded, and the notes are not official publications of any employer.