Governed Pass

A Governed Pass: One Prompt, Five Days, and an Agent That Refused to Certify Itself

*From the author:* I built this over months of failed attempts with AI agents. Every rule in the specification below exists because its absence broke something. I loaded the prompt into an agent on a Sunday; it worked alone for four and a half days and ended by correctly refusing to certify its own work. The write-up is an independent audit by a different model — the specification is mine, verbatim. The next pass gets published whether it works or not.

**A working protocol for multi-day autonomous AI research, with the exact specification that produced it and six empirical integrity findings.**

**Status:** Pass 2 (R2) is complete. It terminated after **4 days 8 hours 53 minutes** of continuous autonomous work with the disposition **`METHOD_NEEDS_REPAIR`** — the specification's designated honest-failure outcome — after its own adversarial review round blocked method freeze with 3 HIGH and 4 MEDIUM findings. No scientific result was run or claimed. Pass 3 is planned; its disposition and runtime will be appended to [UPDATES.md](UPDATES.md) regardless of direction.

**Evidence repository:** currently private. Commit hashes, artifact SHA-256s, and file paths are cited throughout so the mechanics are concrete now and independently checkable later: the evidence repository will be opened when the experiment's method freeze binds pinned model identities, closing the contamination window that early publication would create for the sealed scientific run. Publishing the hashes before the repository opens is deliberate — when it opens, readers can verify nothing was retrofitted in the interim.

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Summary of claims

This document makes five claims, each bound to the evidence chain described below, and deliberately makes no others.

**Claim 1 — the run.** A single specification prompt (reproduced verbatim in [ORIGINAL_PROMPT.verbatim.md](ORIGINAL_PROMPT.verbatim.md)), loaded once into a