Pattern Proposal: Pre-Commit Compliance Guardrail Engine

Summary

Executes programmatic schema and constraint validations against agent outputs prior to state transitions or git commits.

Candidate Pattern

• ID: compliance-guardrail-filtering
• Classification: governance
• Maturity: established
• Type: implemented

Observed Signals

No specific signals listed.

Evidence

Supporting Evidence

• src/cas_runner/governance/compliance_engine.py (ComplianceEngine) - Engine performing compliance evaluations
• src/cas_runner/governance/models.py (ComplianceFinding, ComplianceMetrics) - Typed models for validation results
• .github/workflows/governance-validation.yml - CI invocation of governance compliance checks

Scope Assessment

• Evidence Strength: high
• Confidence: high
• Applies to: ideas-to-life-cas

Rationale

• Intent: Catch structural and semantic violations generated by LLMs before they are published or merged into production branches.
• Context: Executed during workflow validation (governance-validation.yml, cas-build-validation.yml) and within GovernanceActionEngine.
• Force: LLMs frequently emit near-compliant JSON or YAML with missing required keys or invalid enums
• Force: Post-merge failure diagnosis in CI is slow and costly

Traceability

Artifact source: proposed-patterns