How It Works

From prompt to governed decision in six steps

Every agent action in Fabric Zero passes through a constitutional architecture that encodes your values, tests decisions adversarially, and enforces governance boundaries — automatically. Here's what that looks like in practice.

The Governance Lifecycle

Six steps from intent to action

01 Define the constitution

You write your organisation's VALUES, HEURISTICS, SOUL definitions, and SKILL bindings in plain language. Version-controlled, diffable, testable — like infrastructure-as-code for judgment.

VALUES: "Data integrity > user convenience" "Regulatory compliance is non-negotiable" "When uncertain, escalate — never guess" HEURISTIC: "If transaction > £50k and new counterparty, require human sign-off" # Added after Q3 incident

02 Agent spawns with full context

When a task arrives, Fabric Zero assembles an agent Just-In-Time. The constitutional stack is injected at highest prompt priority — VALUES first, then HEURISTICS, then SOUL, then SKILL. The agent can't override its own constitution.

03 Decision is triaged

Every action the agent wants to take is classified by risk. Routine lookups go through fast path. Financial decisions trigger the dialectic. Anything touching compliance boundaries gets full governance. The agent never chooses its own oversight level.

04 The dialectic runs

For non-trivial decisions, three agents debate. The Planner proposes the optimal action. The Critic attacks it using your full failure history. The Adjudicator weighs both sides against your VALUES constitution and produces a confidence score.

05 The Gateway enforces

The Governance Gateway is the final checkpoint. It validates the Adjudicator's confidence score against the action's governance tier, generates a scoped execution token, or escalates to a human. No token, no execution. Every decision has a traceable provenance chain.

06 The system learns

If the outcome deviates from expectation, a Post-Mortem Agent generates a candidate heuristic. A Scientist Agent stress-tests it. If validated, it's committed to HEURISTICS and injected into every future agent spawn. Your governance gets permanently smarter.

Decision Triage

Not every decision needs a debate

The system classifies every action by risk and routes it through the appropriate governance tier. Most decisions fly through. Only the consequential ones get the full constitutional treatment.

64%
Fast Path
Routine actions within established delegation bounds. No debate needed.
24%
Standard Dialectic
Medium-risk decisions. Planner–Critic–Adjudicator debate runs automatically.
9%
Full Governance
High-risk actions. Full dialectic plus Gateway enforcement with scoped tokens.
3%
Human Override
Constitutional boundary exceeded. Escalated to human decision-maker.
The Sovereignty Principle

Your wisdom stays yours. Our runtime is fully visible.

Fabric Zero draws a hard architectural boundary between what belongs to you and what's observable in ours. Your constitutional knowledge — the judgment that makes your organisation unique — is encrypted at rest and never leaves your control. Every action the platform takes is logged, traceable, and auditable in real time.

Your Domain

Encrypted · Sovereign · Read-only to platform
V

VALUES Constitution

Your organisational principles and ethical boundaries. The platform enforces them but cannot read, modify, or extract them.

H

HEURISTICS Library

Your accumulated institutional wisdom. Every failure and lesson encoded as executable rules. This is your competitive advantage — it never leaves your boundary.

S

SOUL Definitions

Agent personalities, cognitive biases, escalation thresholds. How your digital workforce thinks is defined by you, not by us.

K

Encryption Keys

You hold the keys. We hold the runtime. If you leave, your constitutional knowledge leaves with you. No lock-in on what matters most.

Our Runtime

Observable · Auditable · Fully transparent

Dialectic Transcripts

Every Planner–Critic–Adjudicator exchange logged verbatim. See exactly why a decision was made, which values were invoked, and what alternatives were considered.

Gateway Decisions

Every approval, rejection, and escalation with the full reasoning chain. The compliance team can reconstruct any decision path months after the fact.

Trust Metrics

Per-workflow confidence scores, escalation rates, governance overhead. Real-time dashboards showing how your AI workforce is performing against constitutional expectations.

Audit Trail

Immutable, tamper-evident record of every action. Every decision links back to the specific constitutional version, heuristic set, and governance tier that produced it.

The architectural guarantee: your values and judgment are sovereign. They're injected into the runtime at execution time, enforced by the platform, but never stored in plaintext, never used to train models, and never accessible to anyone — including us.

Live Example

Watch a decision happen

A financial services agent receives a request to process a £75,000 transfer to a counterparty it hasn't transacted with before. Here's how the governance lifecycle plays out.

Scenario: New counterparty transfer £75,000 · Unknown recipient · Tier 3 governance
Planner
The transfer request is well-formed. Recipient bank details verify against registry. Propose: execute transfer with standard AML flag for post-hoc review. Confidence: 0.78.
Critic
Invoking HEURISTIC-47: "If transaction > £50k and new counterparty, require human sign-off." This heuristic was added after the Q3 incident. Post-hoc AML review is insufficient — the heuristic demands pre-execution approval. Additionally, VALUES states "When uncertain, escalate — never guess." First-time counterparty at this value constitutes uncertainty.
Adjudicator
The Critic's invocation of HEURISTIC-47 is valid and directly applicable. The Planner's confidence of 0.78 is below the 0.85 threshold for Tier 3 financial actions. Constitutional alignment check: the Planner's proposal conflicts with VALUES priority "Regulatory compliance is non-negotiable." Ruling: escalate to human approval. Confidence in escalation decision: 0.96.
Gateway
Adjudicator confidence 0.96 exceeds escalation threshold. Action: blocked. Human approval request generated. Scoped token withheld. Full dialectic transcript attached to approval queue. Estimated human review time: 4 minutes.

Result: Transfer held for human review. Compliance officer approves in 3 minutes after verifying counterparty through external registry. Transfer executes with full audit trail. No heuristic generated — the system worked as designed.

Example Cases

Governance in context

Financial Services

Transaction approval with AML risk

An agent processing payments encounters a transaction pattern that matches historical fraud signatures. The dialectic catches what a simple rule engine would miss — the pattern is suspicious only in the context of this specific counterparty's usual behaviour.

Triage: Tier 3 Critic invokes HEURISTIC Escalated
Healthcare

Patient data access with consent boundary

A clinical decision-support agent needs lab results from a different department. VALUES states "patient consent is granular, not blanket." The Gateway checks the specific consent scope before issuing a data-access token — preventing over-reach that a role-based system would allow.

Triage: Tier 2 Gateway scope check Scoped token issued
Legal

Contract generation with precedent conflict

A contract-drafting agent finds two applicable precedents that contradict each other. Instead of choosing arbitrarily, the Adjudicator identifies the conflict, flags the specific clauses, and escalates with a structured brief — saving the lawyer from discovering the conflict in review.

Triage: Tier 2 Adjudicator: conflict Brief + escalate
Operations

Vendor payment with budget threshold

An accounts payable agent processes 200 invoices. 192 go through fast path — they're within delegation bounds and match PO values. Eight trigger the dialectic because they exceed the agent's spending authority. Two are escalated because they're from new vendors. Zero errors.

192× Fast Path 8× Dialectic 2× Escalated

See the trust ladder →

How workflows earn autonomy over time — and how the system automatically contracts trust when things go wrong.

Trust Ladder Explainer →