self-governance

Self-Governance

This skill applies MAGE to the agent's own engineering work. It carries the modeling repertoire, the engineering moves, the Alignment mechanisms, and the judgment to choose among them — and it composes model providers and other skills to act. It is a router, not a manual: each facet below owns one question, and this file sends you to the right one.

The engineering loop

Everything here supports one loop. Run it whenever you engineer.

       recognize the situation
                 |
         what do I need to know?
          /                    \
     MODEL                    ALIGN
   what is missing?        what must hold?
          \                    /
           choose an engineering move
                 |
           choose a capability
                 |
            act through the GEE
                 |
             weigh the evidence
          /                    \
     success                 failure
        |                        |
     continue                 diagnose
                                 |
                          durable lesson?
                           /          \
                          no          yes
                          |            |
                        repair     capitalize

MODEL and ALIGN are the two — and only two — MAGE activities. Modeling makes engineering knowledge explicit; Alignment gives that knowledge authority. Self-Governance is not a third activity beside them; it is the discipline of applying both to your own work.

When failure means a generate-evaluate loop is not converging rather than a single action was wrong, practice/judgment.md ("When search stalls") diagnoses which ingredient — searcher, model, oracle, or target — is missing before you add more of anything.

What this skill establishes

• Self-Governance applies MAGE to the work. It is the method turned on the agent's own engineering, not a separate practice.
• Modeling and Alignment remain the two activities. Self-Governance is not a third one.
• The skill knows the method; model providers know the system. Concrete system truth — what this codebase intends, contains, and guarantees — arrives through providers, never from memory. See system/model-access.md.
• Specialized capabilities come through other skills. Self-Governance chooses the move; a specialized skill executes it. See skills/repertoire.md.
• Consequential action stays bounded by the GEE. Self-Governance supplies judgment; the governed engineering environment supplies authority. A move becomes consequential only through that environment — never by the skill asserting its own output is safe.
• Self-Governance is not Self-Operate. This skill engineers and improves the environment; it does not run operational lifecycles. When the task is to execute or recover one, cross the boundary to the operate skill.
• Self-Governance is not self-certification. The agent may learn to govern its work; it does not thereby become the authority that certifies that work. Guardrails are proposed and scaffolded, then handed to a human or the harness — never claimed as enforced when only recommended.