What do you mean by "actually governing the agents at the system level", and how is it different from "herding cats"?
System-level governance means the LLM is completely stripped of orchestration rights. It becomes a stateless, untrusted function. The state lives in a rigid, external database (like SQLite). The database dictates the workflow, hands the LLM a highly constrained task, and runs external validation on the output before the state is ever allowed to advance. The LLM cannot unilaterally decide a task is done.
I got so frustrated with the former while working on a complex project that I paused it to build a CLI to enforce the latter. Planning to drop a Show HN for it later today, actually.
edit: Also seems like peoples replies are getting downvoted to hell and getting marked as dead and dissapear. Someone must not like your idea :-)
The filter instantly shadowbanned the Show HN post when I submitted it, which is why the link was dead for a while. Thankfully, human mods reviewed it and restored it. The link is fully live for a while now!
This sounds like where lat.md[0] is headed. Only thing is it doesn't do task constraint. Generally I find the path these tools are taking interesting.
The key difference is the state mechanism. They use markdown; I use an AES-encrypted SQLite database.
Markdown is still just text an LLM can hallucinate over or ignore. A database behind a compiled binary acts as a physical constraint; the agent literally cannot advance a task without satisfying the cryptographic gates.
I just dropped the Show HN for it here if you want to check out the architecture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601608