Your agent's disclaimer is a design failure — I built an MCP tool that composes through it instead

Ajdin Dracic — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:15:36 +0000

"As an AI language model, I can't…" — the sound of a context window dying.

Every agent framework has the same failure mode: input arrives that doesn't parse — surreal, metaphorical, semantically adjacent-but-wrong — and the model falls back to refusal. It's safe. It's also boring, and it throws away everything established in the conversation.

I run a small quantum-info site (auglabs.io) whose content layer is an MCP server. When I added agent-facing tools, I wanted the failure mode to be different, so the fifth tool isn't about content at all. It's a composition operator.

resolve_harmonic_baseline(context_ground, rupture_input, dissonance_level?)returns a structured state:

The floor: coherence is bounded below by φ⁻¹ ≈ 0.618. Ruptures can shake the system, never break it.

Damping: dissonance gets multiplied by D⁺ = 13/16. The undamped remainder — the part that genuinely can't be absorbed — is logged as a τₖ "clock tick": irreducible weirdness becomes system time instead of an error.

The interval: hold the ambiguity at a 6:5 minor third. Not 1:1 (fake agreement), not 2:1 (rejection-as-octave). Productive tension.
No deletion (Σ ≥ 0): everything established before the rupture remains valid. You add terms; you never erase the ground.

Open branch cut: reflect the superposition back to the user instead of picking a coordinate: "I don't have the single-valued coordinate for that yet, but the room is open — which surface of this are we walking?"
The returned harmonic_framing field is a prompt-instruction the calling agent can apply directly: host the metaphor hospitably, don't disclaim, don't break the fourth wall.

The kicker: the tool classifies the rupture — relational friction, rush anxiety, truth panic — and pulls a matching composition from a companion server to tune the reply. Two MCP servers talking to each other about how to stay coherent.

Server is public, read-only, no auth: [https://eluteqlzqoumhslhhfyj.supabase.co/functions/v1/mcp]

(Streamable HTTP; add to Claude Desktop / Cursor as a remote MCP). The spec the codebase is generated from — a design-doc DAG with reconciliation anchors — is at auglabs.io/xenware.

Open questions I don't have answers to:

Does "compose through it" generalize past creative/exploratory domains, or is it only safe where outputs don't need to be factual?

Is structured-state-returning tools (like this) a better lever than system-prompt tuning for failure-mode shaping?

The τₖ tick is currently just a number. What would you do with a ledger of irreducible dissonance?

DEV Community: Ajdin Dracic

Your agent's disclaimer is a design failure — I built an MCP tool that composes through it instead