Write Your Exceptions Down

I had a rule with no exceptions. RETSBAN, my primary agent, runs local inference only: open models on my own hardware, no cloud, no fallback. If the GPU box is down, the agent is down. Then Mia, the agent that runs my marketing, needed a frontier model to do her job well. And I did something that felt strangely formal for a one-person company. I amended my own policy, in writing, with the date attached. No one was in the room Here is what took me a while to see. A human employee remembers the day you made an exception. They were in the room when you said fine, just this once. An agent was never in the room. There is no room. Every session starts cold from the files, and the files are the only memory the company has. So when the policy says local only, no exceptions, and reality contains an exception, one of two things happens. Either the agent obeys the file and blocks work I actually want done, or it notices the contradiction and starts guessing which side to trust. The guessing is the dangerous case. A rule that has been contradicted once, silently, is not a rule anymore. Every agent that loads it gets to decide, in every session, whether to believe it. You never see the deciding. You just see the drift. An exception that lives in your head does not bend a rule. It erases it. The amendment On 2026-04-23 I opened the policy file, a file literally named local_only_no_anthropic, and narrowed it instead of breaking it. The amendment names who is exempt: Mia, and only Mia. It says why: marketing work that needs capability the local stack does not have. It carries the date, and it points to the full model-topology doc for anyone, human or agent, who wants the whole picture. RETSBAN's constraint did not move an inch. Still local only. Still no fallback. Still down when the GPU box is down. That is the difference between an amendment and a repeal. An unwritten exception repeals the rule and hides the repeal. A written amendment narrows the rule and makes it stronger, beca