docs: why-gates-are-code haelt fest, dass ein Gate in Code auch erreichbar sein muss

Files changed: - docs/why-gates-are-code.md
2026-09-16 19:18:59 +02:00
parent e4e2332e01
commit 4284f101c8
1 changed files with 22 additions and 0 deletions
@@ -51,6 +51,28 @@ The Iteration Budget Gate asks a fourth kind of question - not "is this instance
 itself (call count, repeated identical calls), not from anything about the content of any one
 call.
 ## A gate in code still has to be reachable
 Code beats prose for the reason above, but on its own it buys less than it looks like: a check
 that runs on every call is only as good as the thing it counts under. The Iteration Budget Gate
 scopes its counter to a session, and "session" was approximated by the parent process id whenever
 nothing set an explicit one. On a harness that runs every tool call in a freshly initialised
 shell, that approximation hands out a new session per call - so a traced run of thirty-three calls
 arrived as twenty-one sessions of one to three calls each, the ceiling of sixty was never
 approached, and the loop-breaker's window never held three calls at once to compare. The gate ran
 on every one of those calls, exactly as written, and refused nothing.
 That failure has no symptom of its own. A gate that fires announces that it exists; a gate that
 *cannot* fire looks identical to a gate nobody happened to need - the same clean runs, the same
 silence - and what finally told the two apart was reading a trace for an unrelated reason. So
 there is a third property to keep alongside living in code and carrying measured numbers: each
 gate has to leave evidence that it can still fire. The three that clear by token or by a
 deliberate edit have it by construction, because clearing one is a visible event in somebody's
 terminal. The budget gate, whose ordinary outcome is silence, is the one that had to be given
 it - which is why its session id now carries where it came from, into both the trace and
 `budget status`, so a session's own record answers the question instead of an investigation
 having to.
 ## Numbers that come from measurement, not intuition
 The iteration ceiling didn't start where it sits now. It used to run 15-25, borrowed from a