Autonomous agents need guardrails, not line-by-line scripts

Autonomous does not mean uncontrollable.

Cogweald’s model can decide what happens next in a world. It cannot change the database schema, bypass authorization, arbitrarily rewrite published content, or turn unvalidated text directly into system state.

The guardrails live outside the model:

The model gets creative freedom. The system owns consistency.

This is one of my favorite agent design principles: do not describe every rule in a prompt. If code can guarantee something reliably, let code guarantee it. Give the model the decisions that actually require semantic judgment.