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The Keep gate

An agent proposes a result. Something has to decide whether the platform accepts it. That decision is split deliberately: code enforces the floor; the agent judges the substance.

Two kinds of check​

The split turns on a single question — what does it mean if this check is wrong?

Proof invariants cannot be faked and are cheap to verify: the code actually ran, the source is committed, the requirement is satisfiable, the declared contract was honoured. A miss here means the result is not what it claims to be. These fail hard, always.

Descriptors are the surrounding telemetry — how many items were processed, how fast, what the output looked like. These vary legitimately with the kind of work, and no fixed list of them survives contact with a platform whose whole purpose is absorbing problems nobody anticipated. So a missing or differently-named descriptor is recorded as an advisory alongside the result and weighed by the agent judging it, rather than raising.

What the floor refuses​

Some results are refused no matter how good they look, because "looks good" is exactly the failure mode:

  • A metric that is too good. A result that outperforms what the data can support is treated as evidence of leakage, not success.
  • A large negative generalization gap. When held-out performance falls far below cross-validated performance, the evaluation is not measuring what it claims to.
  • Unbounded iteration. A task has a fixed budget of attempts, enforced by code, so a loop that is not converging stops rather than continuing indefinitely.

These are deterministic. They are not the agent's call, because an agent optimising for a good result is the wrong party to ask whether a suspiciously good result is real.

What the agent decides​

Everything above the floor. Which of several viable candidates to keep, whether an approach has been exhausted, whether a disappointing result is worth another attempt or is telling you the framing is wrong — these are judgement calls, made with the descriptors, the search history, and the brief in view.

Why this shape recurs​

The Keep gate is one instance of a pattern used throughout the platform: guarantee a floor that works without understanding the payload, then layer recognition-based enhancements on top. The alternative — enumerating every acceptable case in advance — fails at a boundary that is open by design.

Where something genuinely must be refused, the refusal is loud, precise about what was wrong, and extensible — never a silent pass, and never a generic failure that leaves an agent guessing.