Governance Standard
Standard 802.4
Governance and Safety Invariants for Autonomous Software Agents
Overview
Standard 802.4 establishes formal governance invariants and machine-enforceable safety standards for autonomous AI agents in software delivery pipelines. It provides the policy-as-code foundation for the Sovereign Software Factory.
Agentic Specializations
- Test-Triage Agent: 92% accuracy in flaky test detection; proposes retries or quarantine
- Security Agent: Evaluates CVE severity and reachability; enforces deployment gates
- Observability Agent: Monitors SLOs and error budgets for canary health
- Feature-Flag Agent: Manages ramp percentages and kill-switches
- Postmortem Agent: Generates incident timelines and remediation PRs
Confidence Thresholds
Autonomous execution is gated by a Confidence Threshold. An agent must achieve a minimum 0.8 confidence score to execute autonomously. Scores below 0.8 trigger mandatory escalation to human oversight.
Hard Invariants (Non-Negotiable)
- Zero Critical CVEs: Block any deployment with reachable critical vulnerabilities
- SLO Delta Cap: Disallow canary promotion if error rate delta exceeds 2%
- Registry Whitelisting: All images must originate from vetted registries
- Confidence Gate: Reject any action with confidence <0.8
Immutable Audit Logging
Every agentic decision must be recorded in an immutable, tamper-proof ledger with:
- Trace ID for cross-referencing telemetry
- Model/Policy versions used
- Structured rationale (JSON format)
- Counterfactual replay capability