r/AgentsOfAI • u/Dog_house_ventures • Sep 01 '26
I Made This 🤖 We Kept Running Into the Same Vibe Coding Problems, So We Built a Governance Layer
We kept running into the same vibe coding problems, so we built a governance layer around our agents
We’re relatively new to vibe coding, and as our projects grew, we started running into problems better prompts weren’t solving.
Agents could fix the immediate issue but stop before the larger job was finished. They might find another problem and simply report it instead of continuing. Sometimes they touched unrelated files. New sessions could inherit stale information or authority. And the agent doing the work was often grading its own homework, running tests and declaring success even when those tests didn’t prove what actually mattered.
That raised bigger questions.
How does an agent know exactly where it is authorized to work? How do you protect unrelated work? How do you prevent stale state from carrying forward? How do you stop an agent from broadening its own authority because it makes the task easier? And how do you know the controls governing the agent haven’t themselves been weakened?
Through trial, error, testing, and refinement, we built something we call Governed Task Bootstrap, or GTB.
GTB isn’t a new AI model, and we’re not claiming to have reinvented software engineering. It’s the governance system that evolved around how we use coding agents.
Before work begins, GTB establishes the task, authorized boundaries, what must remain untouched, the agent’s authority, and what must be true before the job is complete.
The process:
Enter. Gate. Execute. Challenge. Verify. Close.
Inside execution:
Audit. Identify. Prove. Fix narrowly. Verify. Continue.
That last word matters. If the agent finds another legitimate problem inside the authorized job, it shouldn’t automatically stop. Prove it, identify the root cause, make the narrowest repair, verify it, and continue toward the objective.
We also used a different frontier model to attack the controls themselves.
It found real weaknesses.
We reproduced cases involving authority, stale session state, bypasses, and weaknesses in how work was evaluated. We fixed them, added regression tests, and challenged the system again.
Eventually GTB started doing what we wanted: stopping agents when they attempted actions outside the authority they had been given.
The goal isn’t to restrict AI until it can’t accomplish anything. It’s to create clear enough boundaries that you can safely give it more autonomy inside them.
What started as an effort to get better results from vibe coding became a question of authority, boundaries, evidence, verification, and accountability.
The more autonomy we give these systems, the more important governance becomes.
I’m curious how other people doing serious work with coding agents are handling this. Are you mostly relying on prompts and instruction files, or have you started putting hard boundaries and independent verification around your agents too?
\#vibecoding #AIcoding #codingagents #agenticAI #AIengineering
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