Authority at commit time: agents propose; only current admission effects
Sep 25 Salas: OCC for institutional agents — reject-and-rerun on stale deps/components; complete mediation + outbox; 18/18 mediated effects, 8 bypasses detected only with independent journal.
Source: Authority at Commit Time: Reject-and-Rerun Semantics for Governed Agentic Systems
Jesus Salas’s Sep 25 paper states the invariant continuous factories keep rediscovering in distributed-systems language: completion is not authority. Agents may compute for seconds or hours from a snapshot of policy, facts, task state, models, tools, and verifiers that can change before the work lands. Treat them as proposal producers; a logically authoritative service alone compares declared dependencies and component manifests with current state, runs the current verifier, and either reserves an idempotent outbox effect or returns reject-stale / reject-verify for resynchronization and rerun. Unaffected work continues; lost acknowledgments resolve through canonical receipts, not a second dispatch.
The composition is optimistic concurrency control with an institutional read set — normative authority plus model/adapter/prompt/tool/verifier hashes — plus semantic verification and transactional outbox. Evidence layers: Matrix L4/L5 lifecycle fixtures (selective invalidation, 60/60 route assertions across three Phi-4 seeds); a local networked authority/outbox/reconciler (fully mediated: 18 authority commands → 18 external effects; direct-credential arms produced eight extra effects, all detected with independent journal reconciliation and zero false detections in the mediated control); and a delegated-gateway stress study that shows clock/lease/quorum costs when complete mediation is unavailable. Caveats owned: no claim of bypass prevention/reversal, WAN throughput, or verifier correctness — the architectural rule is the point.
Why it matters for code review
Overnight agent fleets that auto-bless their own “done” are stale-effect machines. Review merge admission the way Salas reviews commit: dependency currency and current verification before the effect, reject-and-rerun instead of silently promoting last night’s snapshot, and complete mediation so a side-credentialed worker cannot land around the gate. Bursts still win on ambiguous intent; sustained verified momentum compounds when nothing becomes governed merely because an agent finished typing.