The deterministic checks guarding an agent-built project are a compiler for the workflow — and the load-bearing half of them compile the process, not the code.
Halfway through a Tuesday in early June, after I'd spent the morning turning a handful of written-down conventions into scripts that block a commit when they're violated, I typed a half-formed thought at my coding agent instead of another task:
it feels like with script gates we're building a compiler for our coding-agent-enabled workflow
There were around three dozen of these checks in the project by then. None of them compiles anything in the usual sense. They grep, they parse, they diff one artifact against another and exit nonzero when two things that must agree don't. But the feeling was specific and it wouldn't go away, so I want to take it seriously: what is true about it, and exactly where it stops being true. The place it breaks is the useful part.
The asymmetry under the feeling
