Layer 4
Hard rules
Guardrails that make the safe choice the easy default — and flag risky operations before they happen.
What this layer is
The fourth layer is governance. Rules that cannot be talked around, written in language the AI cannot misinterpret, scoped to the operations where small mistakes have large consequences.
Most of the rules are short. Most of them are about not doing things. Together they create a system that is much harder to break than it would otherwise be — and a system that is honest with the engineer when it does not know what to do next.
Failure mode it prevents
Well-intentioned changes to the parts of the system that least tolerate them.
What happens next
A focused walk through the methodology.
A working session covering all five layers and how they would map to the systems you actually have to modernise.