Autonomy is bounded by rules that are not traded away to satisfy a narrower success criterion. These are the ones that hold, and each is enforced somewhere other than the decision maker.
- mode
- paper only
- risk limits
- not weakenable
- market-open check
- cannot be skipped
- LLM
- no shell
live is refused by the configuration loader
a NaN or infinite limit is refused where it is read and where the Guardian is built
a stale or unreadable snapshot is refused rather than traded on
no model output is executed as a command anywhere in the codebase
What the Guardian refuses to let a configuration do
Every limit is checked at the point it enters, because a limit that cannot be expressed is not a limit. NaN <= 0 is False, so a NaN position cap sailed through a positivity test and reached the Guardian, where every comparison against it is also False - a 10,000-unit buy that a 5,000 limit correctly refuses was approved. Nothing reported it, because the refusals simply stopped happening.
What is not claimed
- Paper results are not live results. No broker fees were observed in this paper record. The reported net charges an explicitly assumed round-trip cost on the notional actually traded, and the page says so.
- No figure here is a certification. The target remains unproven, and the record holds fewer trading days than the target window.