M.F.Borman

Contract theory tells you whether an AI agent’s change is correct. It never had to ask the second question: was the agent permitted to make it?

Verifier-gated code generation looks cheaper. In a regulated enterprise it is a control architecture that produces the evidence you already owe.

A learned system can tell you what your software did. It cannot tell you who is answerable for what that behaviour now obliges you to do.

AI cannot take the four judgements behind a boundary. It can assemble the menu of decisions you choose from. So the thing you audit moves up a level: from whether the decision is right to whether the support behind it was complete.

An autonomous agent stays green while every undeclared obligation it disturbs breaks in silence. Velocity widens the gap, it does not close it. A generator can run the bench but not the floor: discovery, ownership, and who owes what to whom is not a check.