From Craft to Constitution: A Governance-First Paradigm for Principled Agent Engineering

Abstract: The advent of powerful LLMs has ushered in an Age of the Agent,'' enabling autonomous systems to tackle complex goals. However, the transition from prototype to production is hindered by a pervasivecrisis of craft,'' resulting in agents that are brittle, unpredictable, and ultimately untrustworthy in mission-critical applications. This paper argues this crisis stems from a fundamental paradigm mismatch -- attempting to command inherently probabilistic processors with the deterministic mental models of traditional software engineering. To solve this crisis, we introduce a governance-first paradigm for principled agent engineering, embodied in a formal architecture we call ArbiterOS.