Anthony Lewis
AI agents write code faster than most teams can account for it.
I build the delivery systems that close that gap. An authority model that says what an agent may do. A record that proves what it did. Gates that fail loudly when either drifts.
Start the series
- The repository came before the briefThis site was in production before its product brief existed, and its research and requirement stages never ran. What the skip cost, and what it did not.Read the episode
- Two decisions the build forcedWith no requirement stage, this site's first decisions came from the build. Two estate decisions in three days, what each one settled, and what each one left open on purpose.Read the episode
- The stages that ran lateSeven weeks after this site went live, its research and requirement stages ran. The research found a limit that would soon break the published record. The record was already broken.Read the episode
The estate this runs on
- 12
- repositories under one authority model
- 69
- architecture decision records, 5 namespaces
- 47
- cross-language discipline records
- 22k
- lines of tests on the regulated surface
What that means in practice
- Authority is a predicate, not a policy document
- One function decides what an agent may merge. Every transition calls it. A reviewer reads the rule in five seconds instead of trusting a wiki page nobody has opened since it was written.
- A record built for the person who has to answer
- Append-only, one line per action, each carrying the authority that permitted it. Not a chat transcript. Something an auditor, a regulator, or a new joiner can actually read.
- Gates around the step that degrades quietly
- Most of a pipeline fails loudly. The model call does not. It is the one place output gets worse while every test still passes, so it is the one place that earns a regression gate.
This matters most where a change carries a licence condition. It matters everywhere a team wants to move quickly without losing the thread.
Proof, not description
I run this across my own estate. The Authority Gate is the reference architecture behind it: the tier model, the record, the span schema and the checkers, quoted from running code rather than described from memory. It also reports the five things that turned out to be broken when I tested the model by building this site, because a reference architecture that hides its gaps is marketing.
This site is built the same way. Every change reached it through a gated pull request, and the ones carrying my name in public were merged by me, not by the agent that wrote them. The series reports each stage as it happened.
Talk to me
If agents are shipping in your estate and you cannot yet say what they were permitted to do, I would like to hear about it.