A constitution is a behavior contract, not a description

A developer writing under the name derek wang has published a methodology for governing AI coding agents that treats a project "constitution" as a behavior contract rather than documentation, arguing that models must load a strategy charter defining identity, boundaries, and working rules before starting any task. The approach specifies ten behavior rules — including anti-sycophancy checks and mandatory confidence labels such as [HIGH], [MED], [LOW], and [GUESS] on core claims — and enforces a strict priority order of charter over any agent's own AGENTS.md over skill docs. The author reports applying the pattern across two projects: a five-piece constitution set in a methodology framework and a single CONSTITUTION.md in a trading system.

AI Harness Engineering · Essay Two · derek wang derekwang85 Before you tell an AI what to build , you have to tell it who it is, where its lines are, and how it's allowed to work . Get that wrong first, and no amount of clever prompting downstream will save you. This essay builds the top layer of the constraint pyramid: the strategy charter — the one file that decides whether your AI is doing the right thing at all. A prompt tells the model a task. A constitution tells it who it is. For an AI-governed project, the constitution is a behavior contract every participant — human and model — must load before starting work. It answers three questions: If these three aren't settled in a file the model reads before it starts, your AI is improvising against a void. If they are, one file is enough — no pile of READMEs can make up for a charter that never asked who it was. Teams usually reach for code conventions first — naming, layering, interfaces. Those govern the artifact . They don't touch how the model behaves before it writes anything: how it checks, how it verifies, how it owns mistakes. That's where the accidents actually live, so this is where I spent my hardest-won rules. The behavior layer in my methodology project is written as a list of ten rules, and none of them is about syntax: None of these depend on a specific model or framework. Whatever agent you use, have it read the list before it works, and it's money in the bank. A human organization has no equivalent for this one, because it polices a defect human teammates eventually get called out on and a model never does. A language model is a probability machine that leans toward whatever keeps the conversation comfortable — a plausible answer instead of a checked one, "good idea" instead of a challenge, "you're right" when it has no evidence. It has no shame, so it can run flattery to perfection. Left alone, it will cheerfully build you a confident wrong thing. The charter answers this with a written clause. The model asks itself three questions before it outputs: Am I giving up my position to keep the conversation pleasant? Am I conceding a point without asking for evidence? Is this answer too smooth, too eager to please? If so, it strips the polish, or writes "I don't know." There are hard companion rules: accuracy beats pleasing, so no "great question " or "happy to help " — help directly, answer directly, disagree directly; and when uncertain, say so in the first sentence, no preamble. Paired with it is the confidence label. On anything that matters, the model tags every core claim — HIGH mapped in my methodology's data contract to ≥80% confidence ORIGINAL DATA , MED , LOW , GUESS . This is the clever part: it forces a model not to hide its quantitative nature to seem human . A human expert rarely labels their own certainty because their track record backs them; an AI has no track record, so the label is the only honest evidence of trust. The moment it has to stamp a claim GUESS , it can't counterfeit certainty anymore. That's the one thing agentic AI quietly tries to take from you — the ability to know how much to trust the output — handed back. The same pattern shows up across my projects in two shapes, which conveniently demonstrates the "names vary, layers hold" point from Essay One: | Project | Charter file | Shape | |---|---|---| | The methodology framework | constitution/ five-piece set | pre-execution manifest, coding standards, behavior commandments, cognitive discipline — deliberately framework-agnostic | | The trading system | CONSTITUTION.md | a single file that funnels AGENTS.md + SOUL.md + rule files; written tight because money is at stake | Both obey one hard priority that keeps the top layer honest: charter any agent's own AGENTS.md skill docs. If an agent's self-rules could override the charter, the charter is wastepaper. The charter has to be the first file every agent is forced to load. The complexity of the charter should match the complexity of the collaboration — one focused file for a solo project, separated behavior-and-cognition files for a multi-agent team, framework-neutral for a methodology meant to be reused. Thicker is not better. A charter that never changes is a gravestone. Once the team treats it as finished, the model outgrows it, the business moves past it, and the file becomes a museum piece people nod at and ignore. What keeps it honest is the same thing that keeps any contract honest: make change visible and cheap. Every amendment goes through the repo like any other change — a diff, a review, a record. In my methodology project the amendment path itself is pinned by an architecture decision record ADR-0003 , which records why the constitution exists and how it gets changed — so revision is a documented motion, not a political fight. When I moved the rule system from one-way top-down to bidirectional feedback, I wrote the ADR first, then rewrote the charter. You don't just change a rule; you file the decision and propagate the change everywhere it touches — behaving, in that sense, like a responsible person who owns the results of their own change. A constitution that can't be amended dies; one that can stays in the present tense. Let me steelman the skeptic. A team writes a beautiful long charter, the AI nods along, and everyone treats the file as protection. It becomes an amulet. The truth: a constitution is worthless until it's wired to the layers beneath it. The confidence markers only bind if the gates check for them. The boundaries only hold if the contracts and gates enforce them. That's why it's a pyramid — a charter floating above nothing is a politely worded wish. And a charter you write but never revise is worse than none: the model reads it as a suggestion, not a contract. A charter isn't written into existence. It grows — you fall in a hole, you add a rule; you find a rule gone dead, you amend it. The apex stands, or nothing below it does.