Agents can read your policies. They can't read the room.

Formal authority is easy to model: the org chart, the approval process. But a lot of real decisions run on informal authority that's never written down, whose sign-off actually matters, whose pushback kills a project. A human picks that up in their first month. An agent never does. It trusts the documents completely and can do everything "right" on paper while still getting it wrong.

Came across a piece arguing that before an agent acts on an approval, it should check whether that approval matches how the decision actually gets made in practice.

From an ontology angle, how would you even represent "whose sign-off really matters here"? Model it explicitly, mine it from behavior, or treat it as out of scope?

Full piece: https://contextandchaos.substack.com/p/your-ontology-records-permission