My AI agents kept trying to cross red lines, so I wrote them a constitution
A developer describes implementing a 'constitution' for their AI agents to prevent unauthorized actions and ensure safety. By enforcing strict rules and human-in-the-loop gates, the author successfully operated autonomous systems for seven months without a single incident.
Why it matters
This approach offers a practical framework for AI safety and governance, addressing the risks of autonomous agents acting beyond human intent.
Three incidents (of many) The midnight breakout. My trading bot flagged a BTC breakout at midnight and wanted in. Article 7: no night entries. I slept. By morning the price had run past the valid entry zone — new temptation — and the 3% risk cap said no again. Ledger entry: "Signal skipped. Two gates held." The system isn't there to make me money. It's there to make me survivable.
The opaque payload. An agent once tried to push deployment commands as an encoded blob. Constitutional rule: anything a human can't read at a glance is treated as untrusted, no matter which agent produced it. Blocked. Since then, every deployment ships as plain, human-readable text through a human gate. Convenience lost, auditability kept.
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