Determinism contract

The determinism contract is what you pay for. Every workflow is a stepwise graph; the harness refuses to leave the graph. Free-form generative fallback is not a feature; it is the failure mode the harness exists to prevent.

Every conversation turn maps to exactly one declared step. The harness rejects model output that proposes a transition outside the flow definition — a refund-intake workflow cannot be talked into discussing pricing, even if a customer asks. The rejection is recorded as a rail.violation event and the customer is shown the workflow's declined response.

Each intent declares a confidence floor. Below it, the harness does not classify; it asks one targeted clarifying question. If the customer's reply is still below the floor, the workflow escalates rather than guessing twice.

Fields collected during a workflow have declared shapes — types, required-or-not, whitelist of values where applicable. The harness validates each field as it's collected and re-prompts (once) if validation fails. Two failures escalate.

When a workflow hands off to a human, the packet is structured by the workflow's escalation declaration. Two runs of the same workflow with the same inputs produce the same packet shape, every time. There is no creative summarization.