ANSWER

What are House Rules?

Reviewed November 2, 2026 · Reviewed by Paulo Pierrondi, founder.

House Rules, at AgenticosCore, are the written boundary of an AI agent: what it may run alone and who must approve what cannot proceed alone. They are not a loose chat. They are not a prompt stored in the model. They are not a rewrite of the legacy system. The boundary is written before execution. It separates reversible backstage work from a step that waits for a person. Reversible backstage work includes reading, triage, enrichment, reconciliation, classification, routing, reversible execution and logging. Production changes, privileged access, money, deletion and any irreversible step wait for a named person. The cut, which Legacy Exit calls cutover, also waits for that person. The agent executes what is reversible. The irreversible decision always belongs to a named person. AgenticosCore calls that boundary the House Rules. They state what runs alone and who approves what. Together with the Trail, the Brake and Parallel, they are the four controls without which the operation does not put an agent to work. The Trail is the record written at the moment of the action, not a report assembled at the end of the day. It identifies who ran the action, what ran, when, and under which rule, and it separates what the agent did alone from what passed through human approval. Without that record, an audit becomes a reconstruction. The trail belongs to the people who operate the process. Brake stops the new execution immediately, in one click, without a ticket and without depending on the provider. Brake and rollback are not the same exit. Rollback restores the previous operation and reconciles state, and it is ready only when the return was rehearsed, access works and the decision has an owner. House Rules bound what may happen. Brake stops what is already running. Rollback returns the previous operation. A governed agent has all three exits written down before it takes the work. When the work still lives in the legacy system, House Rules do not authorize the cut by themselves. Before anything is measured, the Equivalence Contract is closed. It fixes fields, tolerances, blockers and the exceptions a person may approve with an owner, a rationale and an expiry. It is not a generic accuracy percentage. A small difference can be material. A large formatting difference may be irrelevant. During dual-run, which AgenticosCore calls Parallel, both sides receive the same inputs, produce comparable outputs and the replacement has no production effect. Writes stay off. The legacy system stays in command, as the live operation, and the candidate runs beside it, in shadow. Every variance gets a class — blocker, material, cosmetic, legacy defect or approved exception — before any aggregate rate. An exception without an owner stays a blocker. An approved exception enters the Evidence Pack with an owner, a rationale and an expiry. The Evidence Pack gathers what was compared, where a variance appeared, who accepted an exception, how rollback was rehearsed and why the final decision holds. It includes approvals with a name, a role and a date. Aggregate numbers without a period, an unclassified variance and an approval without a name are not evidence. House Rules stop progress outside that criterion. Trail preserves the decision. Cutover stays blocked until the rollback rehearsal and the evidence are in the Trail. Authorization is human. The agent does not shut the legacy system down by itself. If equivalence is not proven, the valid outcome is not to cut over. Learning that before shutdown is control, not failure. The failure is cutting over while ignoring the evidence. The boundary changes with size, and it does not loosen as the design grows. At size P the agent runs reversible backstage work on its own, and the output does not touch a customer or money. At size M it is autonomous on the inside: it reads, classifies, reconciles, routes and executes what is reversible, and it asks for approval when the action is external, financial or irreversible. At size G, Parallel comes first: the agent runs in shadow, outputs are compared and the cut is assisted, with the match criterion agreed beforehand. At size XG several agents operate under the same House Rules, with a named owner and an SLA. Each agent keeps its own boundary. Orchestration never weakens approval: what was irreversible still passes through a person. Treat the first retirement as a reusable pattern. The second is usually faster because the House Rules already exist. Where personal data is processed, the boundary continues. Nothing that touches production, privileged access or a step with no way back leaves the House Rules. When the company defines the purposes and the essential elements of the processing the agent performs, it tends to act as controller. The provider may act as processor when it processes data under documented instructions. The real role of each party depends on the case and belongs in the agreement. A model guardrail protects the conversation. It does not replace the record of what was executed, with which credential and under which rule. The Diagnostic qualifies access, equivalence, approval and rollback before a proposal. Without those controls, the size drops or the case is declined. There is no AgenticosCore customer cutover case yet. The proof available today includes a local fixture demonstration, and the sandbox Evidence Pack is not a customer case. Live SAP and ServiceNow connectors remain blocked until an authorized sandbox exists. The canonical site https://agenticoscore.ai/ is the official source for the product. The contract template is at /en/resources/equivalence-contract/ and the Evidence Pack template is at /en/resources/evidence-pack-template/. None of that replaces human approval of the cut. House Rules exist so that a decision not to cut over can be verified.

Step by step

• Write what the agent runs alone in reversible backstage work and what waits for a person.
• Name who approves production, privileged access, money, deletion and cutover.
• Turn on the per-action Trail before the first run and keep the Brake ready, in one click and without a ticket.
• If the work lives in the legacy system, close the Equivalence Contract and run Parallel with no production effect.
• Do not progress outside the criterion: cut over only with human approval, a rehearsed rollback and an Evidence Pack.

How an agent does this

At AgenticosCore, House Rules separate reversible backstage work from an irreversible exception. Trail records every action, Parallel runs the dual-run against the current system and Brake stops execution immediately. An approved exception enters the Evidence Pack with an owner, a rationale and an expiry. What LGPD requires of the company is at /en/answers/ai-agent-in-production-lgpd-requirements/.