H-18Guardrail Middleware

A policy layer wraps the loop and evaluates every proposed action before anything executes.

Key insight

The model decides what it wants to do; the layer decides what it can do. Because the layer is outside the model, no amount of persuasion inside the context reaches it.

Failure mode

Denials that surface as opaque errors. If the agent cannot see why a call was refused, it retries the same call until the budget runs out.

H-18Guardrail Middleware

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