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Shin

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Stop / Delay / Block: a minimal execution safety gate (30-second demo)

In Part 1, I argued that convenience tends to eat security.
In Part 2, I showed why point-wise safety breaks once time and irreversibility enter the system.

This final post is intentionally practical.

No benchmarks.
No alignment claims.
Just a small, deterministic gate you can run before an irreversible action.

The problem this gate addresses

Most failures don’t come from a single bad output.
They come from executing too early.

Deployments, payments, permission grants, public releases —
once executed, uncertainty collapses into reality.

This gate does one thing only:
it forces an explicit outcome before execution.

PASS — proceed

DELAY — preserve uncertainty, gather more signals

BLOCK — do not execute

What makes this different

The gate is designed to be:

Deterministic — same inputs, same outcome

Order-robust — reordering checks may affect cost or latency, but should not flip safe → unsafe

Evidence-preserving — uncertainty is not hidden, it is logged

Delay is treated as a first-class outcome, not a fallback.

30-second demo (CLI)

Clone the repo and run one command:
git clone https://github.com/shin4141/decision-os-paper
cd decision-os-paper
python cli.py examples/decision_request_delay.json

You’ll see a structured verdict like:
{
"verdict": "DELAY",
"reason": "High impact with unresolved uncertainty",
"evidence": ["impact=high", "confidence=low"],
"next_action": "human_review"
}

Change the input scenario and re-run.
The behavior is deterministic.

Why this matters

This gate does not predict the future.
It does not try to be smarter than the system it protects.

It simply ensures that irreversible actions are never taken
while uncertainty is still unresolved.

Safety here is not a moment.
It is a trajectory.

Open question

If reordering safety checks can turn a safe outcome into an unsafe one,
is the system actually safe — or just lucky?

What invariants should hold before we allow irreversible execution?

Code: https://github.com/shin4141/decision-os-paper

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