Pattern Proposal: Finite Transition Governance Guardrail

Summary

Restricts autonomous agent actions to state changes explicitly validated by an authoritative transition registry.

Candidate Pattern

• ID: finite-transition-governance-guardrail
• 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) - Restricts artifact state updates to predefined legal state edges.
• src/cas_runner/governance/governance_action_service.py (GovernanceActionService) - Applies vetted transitions as atomic business services.

Scope Assessment

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

Rationale

• Intent: Prevent LLM or autonomous processes from promoting, deprecating, or skipping architectural artifact lifecycle states arbitrarily.
• Context: When a run requests a state mutation for an Architecture Decision Record (ADR), Pattern, or Rule.
• Force: Autonomous agents tend to bypass intermediate states (e.g. promoting 'proposed' directly to 'retired') if unconstrained.
• Force: Hard-coding transitions across disparate agent handlers leads to security drift.

Traceability

Artifact source: proposed-patterns