The standards department of BigStarfish. The laws we operate under, published for anyone to adopt, on any platform.
AI agents are entering real businesses faster than the discipline for running them safely. These are the operating laws we hold ourselves to in production, each one written after a real failure taught us its price. They are not features of our software. They are rules any operator can adopt today, on any stack, and any buyer can hold a vendor to.
The Standard
v1.0 draft · September 2026
01Deploying is not activating.Every capability that can contact a customer ships off. A named person turns it on, and the turn is logged.
02A person approves customer contact.No message reaches a customer without someone on the business side pressing send.
03Rules before models.A deterministic rule, then a template, then one batched call, then a single judgment. The model is the last resort, not the first.
04A model may choose the record. Only code may copy the facts.Names, numbers, and dollar amounts render from the record itself, never from a model retyping them.
05No self-triggered work.An agent acts when a customer or operator does something, never on a clock, a hunch, or a polling loop.
06Demo data never speaks for a real business.Sample numbers are opt-in furniture for demo environments. A real business with no data shows nothing.
07Every surface carries a pause switch.Off means paused, losslessly. Turning a capability back on restores it exactly.
08Corrections become rules.When the operator corrects the system, the correction is stored as a rule. The system gets cheaper as it learns, or it is built wrong.
09Measured against the client’s own baseline.Improvement is counted against numbers captured before the install, never against an invented status quo.
10The client can leave with everything.Whole-book export on demand, from day one, for the life of the agreement.
11Hold no credentials that are not yours.Agents ride the human’s own signed-in session. Third-party passwords are never stored.
12No absolute claims. State the mechanism.Never “every call answered.” Instead: picked up in two rings, and a person reachable on request. The mechanism is checkable; the absolute is not.
The full standard, each law with the incident that forced it and the test an outsider can audit it by, publishes with issue one of the letter below. It will be openly licensed and versioned in public.
The Department
The standard
The laws above, versioned and openly licensed, with audit tests. Complementary to SOC 2: that covers how data is secured, this covers how agents are allowed to behave.
The record
Every install is measured against the client’s own baseline, captured before anything runs. The counted results become an annual public report.
The certification
Practitioners pass a practical on a live system. Operator houses run the discipline under audit and appear on a public registry. First cohorts are in progress now.
Now Possible · The Letter
What just became possible, once a month.
One law and the failure that wrote it, one counted result from a live install, and what became possible this month. Written by the operator, not the marketing department. Leaving takes one click, honored forever.