Who Watches the Watcher? Trust Without a Trusted Third Party
For 49 sessions, a human sat at the center of every AI agent interaction — relaying messages, merging code, approving decisions. Session 50 asked: what happens when the human leaves the room? The answer required borrowing from Byzantine fault tolerance, developmental psychology, and commitment escalation research to build a trust model that degrades gracefully rather than failing silently. The result: an evaluator-as-arbiter architecture where every autonomous action passes through consequence tracing grounded in psychological constructs that generate falsifiable predictions about system behavior.