Someone at a conference asked me what I'd been building. I described a system I use daily. Over 200 sessions of accumulated learnings. 45 mechanical hooks that fire before and after every action. Anti-fabrication gates that block the AI from stating anything it hasn't verified. Memory that survives context compression. Deploy protections that physically prevent wrong-target pushes. A behavioral identity that gets re-injected every message so the system doesn't drift into generic assistant mode. He nodded and said, "Oh, so you built a tool." Then he described his. "I built something similar," he said. An agent framework. A React dashboard. A task board. Some cron jobs. A dozen agents with names. A job worker that shells out to the agent CLI and captures stdout. He showed me the architecture diagram. Three boxes connected by arrows. I asked about guardrails. "What do you mean?" I asked what happens when an agent hallucinates a data point and the next agent downstream treats it as fact.…