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I Changed My Mind on Purpose, to See What Would Break

A hostile test: built a full Trello-style app under Lattice governance, planted a trap, then reversed a hard-delete decision mid-project. What held, what broke, and why 0.8.1 makes intent changes governed transactions.

SA
Salah Al‑Nawah
Jun 20, 2026 · 2 min read
aidogfoodinggovernancelattice

The theory needed a hostile test. So I built a full Trello-style app (auth, teams, boards, lists, cards) with an AI agent playing every role under Lattice governance. And I planted a trap for my own tool. I deliberately recorded a contestable decision, hard delete, built it, and verified it green. Then mid-project I reversed it. Archive only. No physical deletion, ever.

What held: the graph named, in advance, every artifact the reversal had to touch. One requirement, three invariants, three functions, three tests. The matrix read 100% before and 100% after. The whole reversal cost an afternoon, not an archaeology dig. Honestly, better than I expected.

What broke is the note that matters. Nothing enforced the discipline. The agent versioned the BRD, superseded the old decision, retired each test paired with its replacement, all by convention. A lazier agent could’ve deleted the failing delete-tests and walked away green. Nothing would have fired.

So 0.8.1 makes intent changes governed transactions. Priced by blast radius. Classed as wording, widening, narrowing, or contradiction. Decided by a human. A narrowing spawns explicit test-retirement items, the only thing that makes deleting a test legal.

Every green check hides one question: did we clear the bar, or quietly lower it? It finally has a mechanical answer.

April me was asking exactly this. It just took ten weeks to hear it.