A guardrail placed nowhere guards nothing

The guardrails cockpit. Each line says "placed on N gates" or "placed nowhere".

We had 32 written guardrails: clear, named rules, each with its code. Not one was attached to a gate.

They lived in a table of their own. Nothing said where they apply. A rule with no place is enforced nowhere.

Placing a rule on a gate

A gate can now name the rules it holds. That constrains nothing by itself: it says, at the spot where the work goes through, what this gate answers for. So it can be held to account.

Six out of thirty-two

We only placed what we could show. Six rules found their place, each for a reason read in the code: the one refusing an empty report applies to the 330 gates held by an agent, because that is exactly where the refusal happens.

26 still guard nothing, and the page writes it at the top, first. Filing them by guesswork would have produced a complete and false table. A visible hole beats a fake tidy-up.