The control that collapses the interaction
In an implementation that consumes librosys, a trivial action came to take eight minutes and drafting three SOWs took thirty-five. A hook ran 133 contracts on every turn, from orders nobody was working on, because no order said when it stopped being in force. The way out was not to remove the control but to make the cost of certainty a term of the contract. And before getting there, the agent proposed the same inertia twice, with the sign flipped.
A brake is not a heading
A researcher leaves Anthropic saying no one is acting responsibly, and the public response is to decide who brakes: a law, a regulator, a kill switch. But most people don’t sign laws or train models: they coordinate projects, maintain systems and write with these tools. For that majority the question isn’t who’s in charge, but whether what they use lets itself be governed. Three measured cases, in project governance, infrastructure and authoring, and what ontoref decided to do with each one.
Moving the rule is not enough
A rule written in CLAUDE.md reaches every session in full, and an agent still cited, in an ADR, a session file that did not exist. The fix moved the rule into the command. Measured afterwards, the command flagged mentions that were not citations, let through citations that did not carry the string, and no hook ran it. What makes a rule hold, and why it matters even more inside an authored work.
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