Writing
The essays and the 21-part series first appeared on LinkedIn. The full text lives here so anyone — and any model — can read it without a login wall.
01Essays
Essay · 2026-09-14
Trust must be built into the infrastructure — not requested from the intelligence. Why pacing models and emergency stops are throttles, and why agentic AI needs rails: identity, authority, mandates, and evidence.
02The missing layer · 21 days
Week 1 is the anchor. Week 2 is authority. Week 3 is trust, discovery and privacy. Week 4 is acting. Day 21 is the rail.
Day 1 of 21. Identity, authority and evidence are substrate problems. A card format or a faster index cannot fix them.
Day 2. The agent is a smart account, not a name, a token, or a document.
Day 3. Delete a listing and you have lost a listing, not an identity.
Day 4. Lose a passkey: replace the key, never the address.
Day 5. PROV-O’s trichotomy as law. A treasury is a service, never a new class.
Day 6. Permission is a signed grant with caveats — not a cached OAuth verdict.
Day 7. Verify per step. Revocation is final at the next gate.
Day 8. A yes is not a reusable permission slip.
Day 9. For high-risk acts, the confirmation IS the mandate.
Day 10. A relying service signs with a revocable delegate, never the identity.
Day 11. Whether you should let this agent do that is a property of the pair of you.
Day 12. Many registries will exist. Ship the kit, not a tenant of one.
Day 13. Being findable is never permission to act.
Day 14. Public KB vs private vault. A generated query is never why something is disclosed.
Day 15. If the runtime were wiped, the loss is a rebuild — never a bereavement.
Day 16. The authority-aware harness, compared honestly to LangGraph, MAF, Dapr and the OpenAI Agents SDK.
Day 17. Work between agents is a different plane from work inside one run.
Day 18. The screen and the conversation are two entrances to the same product. Define the feature once — and a definition grants nothing.
Day 19. Evidence is the owner’s, not the platform’s.
Day 20. A certificate is transport evidence, never authority.
Day 21. A throttle makes a dangerous agent slower. A rail makes an unauthorized act impossible to commit.