Section 4
Procedure qualification
The path a piece of work takes before an agent is allowed to run it, and the conditions that take that permission away.
Qualification is required
No procedure is run by an agent before it qualifies. Work that has never been done end to end by a person is not a procedure yet; it is an intention, and intentions are not delegated.
One complete execution
The work is executed once from start to finish, with a person composing each step, against the live system or a faithful copy of it. Partial executions do not qualify. A step skipped because its condition did not arise stays unqualified, and the procedure carries that gap in writing.
Failure capture
Every failure, ambiguity, and manual correction during that execution is recorded as it happens, in the words used at the time. Recollection afterward is not capture. A run that reports no friction is treated as unobserved rather than clean.
Playbook
The playbook is written from that execution, one entry per step. Each entry states three things: run, the exact action to take; verify, the read that confirms it and the result expected; recover, what to do when the verification fails. Where no recovery exists, the recover entry reads halt and escalate, which is a complete answer.
No step without a verification
A step whose result cannot be read back from the system that owns it is redesigned until it can be, or it is excluded from agent operation and left with a person.
Cold verification
A second party runs the procedure from the playbook alone, without access to its author and without the original run in memory. Every point at which the follower must infer, guess, or ask is a defect in the playbook, corrected before qualification. The cold run is the qualifying run; the first one was research.
Hardening
Limits discovered across the two runs move from prose into code. Qualification completes when the constraint set for the procedure exists, is enforced where the change is committed, and has been tested by deliberately attempting to exceed it.
Registration
A qualified procedure is registered with its owner, the systems it touches, its constraint set, the trust level it requires, its success condition, and the interval at which it runs. Work that is not in the register does not run.
Disqualification
A procedure leaves qualified status immediately when any of the following occur: a system it touches changes its behavior or its interface; a step is added, removed, or reordered outside a recorded revision; a run halts at a state the playbook does not describe; the constraint set fails to load; or the procedure has not run within its registered interval.
Requalification
A disqualified procedure drops to Level 1 until it requalifies. Clauses 4.2 through 4.7 are repeated for the changed portion. Where more than one step changed, the whole procedure requalifies, because the interaction between steps is what changed.
Qualification governs one procedure in isolation. Section 5 governs what happens when qualified procedures are stacked together.
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