Pattern Proposal: Declarative State Machine Governance
Summary
Enforces valid agent lifecycle state transitions through an explicit transition registry and governance action engine.
Candidate Pattern
- ID:
declarative-state-machine-governance - Classification: intelligence
- Maturity: established
- Type: implemented
Observed Signals
No specific signals listed.
Evidence
Supporting Evidence
- src/cas_runner/governance/governance_action_engine.py (TransitionRegistry, GovernanceActionEngine) - Registry and execution engine governing permissible state changes.
- src/cas_runner/governance/governance_action_service.py (GovernanceActionService) - Service coordinating action invocation against the governance model.
- src/cas_runner/governance/models.py (GovernanceAction, GovernanceException) - Typed definitions of governance action intents and exceptions.
Scope Assessment
- Evidence Strength: high
- Confidence: high
- Applies to: ideas-to-life-cas
Rationale
- Intent: Prevent agents from executing arbitrary or illegal mutations on architecture artifacts by verifying transitions against a declarative registry.
- Context: Agent-driven architecture lifecycle management where decisions, rules, and patterns transition from proposal to active governance.
- Force: Unchecked autonomous agents can skip required review or validation steps
- Force: Hardcoded transition logic scattered across agent scripts becomes brittle and impossible to audit
Traceability
Artifact source: proposed-patterns