Write Your Exceptions Down
I had a rule with no exceptions. RETSBAN, my primary agent, runs local inference only: open models on my own hardware, no cloud, no fallback. If the GPU box is down, the agent is down. Then Mia, the agent that runs my marketing, needed a frontier model to do her job well. And I did something that felt strangely formal for a one-person company. I amended my own policy, in writing, with the date attached.
01No one was in the room
Here is what took me a while to see. A human employee remembers the day you made an exception. They were in the room when you said fine, just this once. An agent was never in the room. There is no room. Every session starts cold from the files, and the files are the only memory the company has.
So when the policy says local only, no exceptions, and reality contains an exception, one of two things happens. Either the agent obeys the file and blocks work I actually want done, or it notices the contradiction and starts guessing which side to trust. The guessing is the dangerous case. A rule that has been contradicted once, silently, is not a rule anymore. Every agent that loads it gets to decide, in every session, whether to believe it. You never see the deciding. You just see the drift.
An exception that lives in your head does not bend a rule. It erases it.
02The amendment
On 2026-04-23 I opened the policy file, a file literally named local_only_no_anthropic, and narrowed it instead of breaking it. The amendment names who is exempt: Mia, and only Mia. It says why: marketing work that needs capability the local stack does not have. It carries the date, and it points to the full model-topology doc for anyone, human or agent, who wants the whole picture. RETSBAN's constraint did not move an inch. Still local only. Still no fallback. Still down when the GPU box is down.
That is the difference between an amendment and a repeal. An unwritten exception repeals the rule and hides the repeal. A written amendment narrows the rule and makes it stronger, because now the rule has visibly survived contact with a real exception. The next agent to read the file does not have to wonder if the local-only line is stale. It can see the line was tested, on a specific date, for a specific reason, and held.
What broke
Before this I kept preferences in my head and re-explained them session after session. Every correction died with the session that heard it. I was giving the same review, over and over, to a workforce with perfect skill and no memory.
03The same move in medical billing
This is not an agent-fleet quirk. Last week, in my medical-billing business, I retired a ship gate on the denial-assessment engine. The old gate required the tuned API to agree with a weaker agent rater. A 150-case run showed the gate measured the wrong thing: on genuine divergences the API matched the golden answers about 78 percent of the time, and the agent rater about 38. The gate could never pass, and passing it would have meant nothing.
I did not quietly stop running it. The change record says the gate was retired, says why, and says when the change was ratified: 2026-07-08. It says what replaced it: score the API against golden answers directly, with the floor at 90 percent. Whoever touches that system next quarter, human or agent, inherits the reasoning and not just the residue.
The result
Nearly three months after the amendment, both rules hold exactly as written. RETSBAN has made zero cloud calls, Mia has exactly the access the file grants, and no session has argued with either fact.
04Your judgment is production config
You version your code. You probably version your infrastructure. The strange part of running an AI agent workforce is that your own judgment joins the list. What you want, what you forbid, what you decided to allow anyway: the agents execute whatever the file says. So the file is the policy, and an edit to the file is a deploy.
Key insight
An exception you keep in your head deletes the rule. Amend the file instead, with the date, the scope, and the reason attached.
So this is what I do now, and what I would tell anyone running agents:
- 1Put the rule where the agent reads, not where you think. A rule outside the files does not exist.
- 2Amend, do not repeal. Narrow the rule and keep it.
- 3Attach the date, the scope, and the reason. A future session cannot ask you follow-up questions.
- 4The moment you catch yourself carrying an exception in your head, the rule is already gone. Writing it down is the undo.
A rule you never amended is not a rule. It is a rumor about a rule, and every session of every agent decides whether to believe it. Write your exceptions down. A rule is only as real as its history.