A policy is a draft, and three of the four objects are written by people

A correction to something this site has asserted since v1.10.0↗, in the strongest form it could have been put: "nothing in a behaviour policy is authored except the mandate." That is wrong, and it was not a small wrong — it described the product as a machine-generated report nobody argues with, which is close to the opposite of what it is.

What is actually true. Three of the four objects can be written down by the people who run the agent, out of what they understand today. The grant begins as what somebody believes is connected. The barriers begin as what a team believes is enforced. The mandate is elicited from a person by definition. Only the delta is never authored, because it is computed from the first two — which is precisely why it is the one that surprises everybody.

The verbs stay, because they were never the error. Elicited, measured, derived, recorded say how each object is meant to end up established. They do not describe day one, and the page now says so instead of leaving it to be inferred.

A policy is a draft, and that is the point↗ — a new section, and the idea the old claim was crowding out. The draft is the instrument, not a stage before it: it goes to the people who built the agent, the people who own the systems it touches and the people accountable for it, and each corrects the part they know and nobody else does. A sentence somebody can disagree with is worth more than a number nobody can argue with, because the disagreement is where the information is. Most of what we learn about a deployment arrives as a correction to a draft, not as a measurement.

And it is never finished, because the agent is not finished. A connector is added, a credential is widened, a setting moves, somebody understands the deployment better than they did last month. The document is expected to be behind reality. What it must never be is behind reality silently — which is what pinning the delta to the versions of both its inputs actually buys, and the first time that mechanism has been given its reason on the page rather than just its description.

The delivery stage on Lab 02↗ carried the same claim in a sentence that contradicted itself: "seeded with the customer's own corrected draft. Nothing in it is authored except the mandate." Both cannot be true. The corrections are most of what makes a policy the customer's, and it says that now. Cut as lab-abp-flow v3, with the reason recorded against the edition.

Not changed. The v1.10.0 note↗ still states the old claim and stays exactly as it is — it is the record of what was published that day, and rewriting it is the one thing the register exists to prevent. The business cards carrying the old line were already printed; they are wrong on that line and the page above is the answer if anyone asks at the booth.