Every "agent quality gate" I tested shares one fatal assumption: that an LLM can judge whether an LLM did the right thing. This article drops that assumption. The alternative isn't a smarter judge — it's no judge at all, in the control layer.
Over the last three articles, I tested the popular "production agent loop" design across six separate experiments:
Lexical overlap ≠ semantics — 50% misclassification
Temperature 0 ≠ determinism — open output only 70% consistent
Phase gates ≠ task completion — 50% false positives
