Rungs
Model
- Autonomy pattern
- Raw language-model behavior remains closest to open-ended generation.
- Determinism purchased
- Model choice sets capability, latency, residency, cost, and baseline variance.
- Failure mode
- A foundation decision hides downstream constraints until late design.
API
- Autonomy pattern
- The model still writes the answer, but the call surface gains typed controls.
- Determinism purchased
- Schemas, tool-call formats, caching, and provider boundaries make outputs easier to bound.
- Failure mode
- Prompt shape, retention, and output validation get treated as incidental plumbing.
LoRA
- Autonomy pattern
- Repeated style or domain behavior moves from prompt memory into learned weights.
- Determinism purchased
- Stable voice and repeated domain patterns stop competing for context-window space.
- Failure mode
- A frozen adapter bakes stale policy, poisoned examples, or borrowed voice into production.
RAG
- Autonomy pattern
- Facts move out of model memory and into retrieval over named sources.
- Determinism purchased
- Freshness, provenance, and document scope become inspectable runtime inputs.
- Failure mode
- Bad chunks, poisoned corpora, or unscoped retrieval make grounding look safer than it is.
Skills
- Autonomy pattern
- Repeatable procedures move from free-form reasoning into bounded routines.
- Determinism purchased
- Known steps, input checks, and local tests replace repeated prompt interpretation.
- Failure mode
- A brittle skill receives authority without versioning, review, or failure handling.
MCP
- Autonomy pattern
- Tool discovery and context access move into a named protocol surface.
- Determinism purchased
- Read/write boundaries, resources, tools, and transports become explicit contracts.
- Failure mode
- A convenient tool catalog becomes an unreviewed privilege boundary.
Agents
- Autonomy pattern
- The system can plan, call tools, remember, and loop across steps.
- Determinism purchased
- Budgets, termination rules, scoped tools, and review gates constrain the loop.
- Failure mode
- Excessive agency turns one fluent step into runaway action, cost, or authority.
Graphs
- Autonomy pattern
- Control flow moves from emergent model choice into explicit nodes, edges, and gates.
- Determinism purchased
- Replayable topology, idempotent steps, and branch conditions make behavior inspectable.
- Failure mode
- Implicit orchestration hides race conditions until production load finds them.
Eval and Observability
- Autonomy pattern
- Uncertainty about behavior moves into measurement, traces, and drift checks.
- Determinism purchased
- The system gains evidence about whether the chosen rung still works.
- Failure mode
- A working demo silently degrades because no sentinel watches the failure mode.
Governance
- Autonomy pattern
- Policy, disclosure, and publication judgment move into explicit constraints.
- Determinism purchased
- Claims, evidence, authority, and release posture become reviewable artifacts.
- Failure mode
- A plausible story outruns the receipts, boundaries, or public-source trail.
Proof Work
Every page should name a rung, a trade, a failure mode, and at least one receipt. Articles
carry the same fields in frontmatter. The public content contract exports them for agents.
Drift Gates
The build should fail when a published article lacks ladder metadata. The static public
contract should also fail when a page or article lacks a rung, trade, failure mode, or receipt.
The point is not decoration. The point is structural memory.
