The Steady Presence Post-Mortem

The Steady Presence Incident Loop (Protocol A-03) is a hardcoded governance protocol within the Strategic Intelligence Engine (SIE). It dictates that every system failure or human correction is treated as a formal incident [1]

Instead of a human simply correcting an AI hallucination and moving on, this protocol forces the system to achieve Hormesis—the biological principle of gaining strength from stressors. By executing a blameless post-mortem, the Fleet Commander ensures the entire system learns from every mistake, making it antifragile and self-improving by design [1]

Incident Triggers

The Steady Presence Incident Loop is automatically activated by specific technical and operational events [2]:

• Agent Failure: Unhandled exceptions in the agent execution code, API timeouts, or schema validation errors automatically trigger a webhook.
• Human Rejection: When the Fleet Commander rejects an output during the Triage stage of the Intelligence Lifecycle, a “correction” event is fired via a dedicated tool or script.

The Blameless Post-Mortem Framework

When a trigger occurs, the Fleet Commander must execute the following three-step framework to resolve the incident and eliminate the root cause.

1. Snapshot the Event

The system automatically captures the exact state of the failure to prevent data loss. The trigger event aggregates the agent’s execution logs, the failed output payload, and the human’s correction notes [2] This data is used to automatically create a new issue in a designated repository (e.g., GitHub Issues) using a standardized “Blameless Post-Mortem” template. This formalizes the failure and removes human emotion from the debugging process.

2. Classify the Root Cause

The Fleet Commander must identify why the agent failed or hallucinated. Axiomatic rule: The failure is rarely the LLM’s fault; it is almost always a failure of context, constraints, or data freshness.

Common classifications include:
– Stale Data: The agent retrieved outdated information from the Knowledge Core [3] – Schema Ambiguity: The 03_schema lacked the necessary constraints to force the agent into the correct output format.
– Tool Failure: The agent lacked the proper Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool to verify its claim against an external database.

3. Generate System Immunity

The final and most critical step is translating the root cause into a permanent systemic fix. The Fleet Commander must update the source document in the Knowledge Core, refine the 03_schema, or adjust the root SIE_AGENT_PROTOCOL.md file [3]

Strict Protocol Enforcement

To guarantee that the SIE continuously improves, the Steady Presence Incident Loop includes a hardcoded enforcement mechanism.

An incident cannot be marked as “resolved” in the orchestration system until it is explicitly linked to a committed protocol update or a new automated test change [4] This strict enforcement ensures that the Human Correction Tax is paid only once per error class, permanently immunizing the fleet against repeating the same mistake.