The Manifesto for
Agentic Automation
v1.0
Governing the Shift from Automation to Autonomy. The standard for Autonomous Workflows.
We are standing at the edge of the Probabilistic Era.
For the last twenty years, professional automation was built on the foundation of Determinism. In Infrastructure, we used Ansible and Terraform. In Finance, we built rigid algorithms. If a system broke, it was a bug in the logic. The liability was static.
The Shift
Today, we are handing control to systems that do not follow instructions, they interpret intent.
AI Agents are not scripts. They are probabilistic operators. They reason, plan, and execute. While this promises exponential velocity, it introduces a new, existential risk: Stochastic Liability.
To build a future where autonomous agents can be trusted with critical systems, we adhere to the following principles:
The Principle of Separation
Reasoning must be separate from action.
Intent must be decoupled from Execution. An agent must never be granted the authority to 'think and act' in a single, opaque atomic step. Just as Terraform separated Plan from Apply, Agentic workflows must separate Reasoning from Action.
The Principle of Provenance
Every output must carry its creation story.
Output without history is contraband. In a probabilistic workflow, the final artifact is meaningless without the context of its creation. We require a cryptographic link between the agent's identity, the input context, the model used, and the final output.
The Principle of External Sovereignty
No agent can be its own authority.
Safety guardrails must exist outside the agent's cognitive loop. We cannot rely on an LLM to 'promise' it checked for security. Policy must be deterministic code, executed by a neutral orchestrator.
The Principle of Immutable Evidence
Logs must be proofs, not just text.
In the event of failure, a simple text log is insufficient. Autonomous systems require a chain of custody that is mathematically non-repudiable. Every decision and state change must be signed and sealed.
The Principle of Ephemeral Identity
Static keys are a failure of architecture.
Autonomous agents are transient processes. They should not hold long-lived credentials. Identity must be ephemeral, issued only for the duration of a specific task, and cryptographically bound to the workload.
Join the Movement
We believe that the move from "Automation" to "Autonomy" requires a fundamental shift in how we architect trust. We commit to building systems that prioritize Verification over Vibes and Safety over Speed.
via GitHub Star
Signatories