Consider a reconstructed incident that shows up when teams treat an agentic loop as an architecture review. A backend pair watched their coding agent close six steps with a confident summary and a tidy pull request. The suite was green, the changelog mentioned Redis-backed sessions, and nobody had added Redis to compose, secrets, or the runbook. The miss was not a weak model so much as a missing freeze on what the repository was allowed to assume.
Developer glossaries often present planning, tools, memory, and loops as if those nouns were safety properties. Those nouns describe a control flow, not a signed agreement about services, environment variables, or network ports. The practical question is not whether the agent sounded agentic, but whether a new dependency appeared without a prior contract line. The rest of this FAQ restates four claims teams repeat, then offers a checker that fails the build when the contract is violated.
Claim: a finished agentic loop means the design was negotiated
Engineers often read a multi-step trace as evidence that the agent and the repository reached a shared understanding. The trace usually contains file reads, a patch, a test command, and a paragraph that restates the patch in calmer language. That sequence resembles a hiker who stops when the trees look familiar rather than a committee that recorded dissent. Green tests record that the new code agrees with itself, not that Redis, object storage, or a queue existed yesterday.
