Foundations
The integrity gap
When work is delegated to an agent, six things can quietly drift apart: the state a person understood, the state the agent inferred, the state external systems hold, the actions currently allowed, the effects that already happened, and the results that were verified.
Six states that should agree, and often do not
| State | Lives in | Goes wrong when |
|---|---|---|
| Understood | The person’s head | A summary sounded finished; a green check was read as “done” |
| Inferred | The agent’s context | Two fields were compared as one quantity; an old observation was trusted |
| Held | The ERP, the store, the repository | Another person or system changed it after the agent looked |
| Allowed | Policy, roles, delegation, approvals | An approval for v3 is used to run v4; a credential is taken as permission |
| Happened | The remote systems’ effects | A response was lost; one target applied and another did not |
| Verified | Read-backs and checks | “Applied” is shown as “synced”; an unobservable side effect is counted as passed |
We call this the Agentic Work-State Integrity Gap. Lyotic’s job is to stop one fluent answer or one green check from papering over it.
Why better screens are not enough
A well-designed dashboard can still lie by composition. A card that says Synced when an adapter returned 200 has confused execution with verification. A bigger approval dialog does not help if it approves a version that no longer exists. A calm interface that hides an unknown outcome is not calm; it is wrong.
Lyotic therefore works one level below the screen. It defines what the work is, which states it can be in, which of them a representation may claim, and which controls are allowed. Screens are rendered from that. Form adapts. Meaning persists.
Integrity is not sameness
Different roles, devices and moments legitimately see different projections of the same Case. A finance reviewer does not need the mapping diff; a phone does not need the full trace. Each projection may omit. None may contradict, and no omission may change the meaning of a fact or of an authority (INV-10).
PrincipleDifferent screens are allowed. Different realities are not.A projection can leave things out. It can never say something the Case does not.
What “meaning” is
Meaning is not the sentence on screen. In Lyotic it is eight things held together:
- the work’s identity (which Case, which object, which records in which systems),
- its state on each independent axis,
- the evidence for each claim and how strong it is,
- the judgments made and the reasons recorded then,
- the authority behind each action, per layer and per version,
- the impact: what changes and what is preserved,
- the execution history, per target,
- and the verified scope: what was checked, what could not be.
The form of the interface may change. Those eight may not be distorted by the change.
Where this shows up
Two reference cases carry the whole system: an inventory mapping where 5,400 and 1,620 are both right, and a coding agent where “tests passed” is not “the user’s problem is solved”. The distinctions are the same; the components adapt.