§7.4 · BUILDING · 4 MIN READ · EDITION 1.0
Guardrails and rules as a control layer
Deterministic rules — required fields, prohibited terms, hard numeric limits — sit alongside model reasoning as a control layer that does not depend on the model behaving as expected.
A guardrail that rejects an out-of-range value or an unsupported claim before it reaches a reviewer is a cheap, reliable control that does not require the underlying model to be perfectly correct.
Guardrails are not a substitute for evaluation; they narrow the space of possible failures but should themselves be tested, not assumed to work.
PUT THIS INTO PRACTICE
- 01Add deterministic guardrails wherever a hard rule applies.
- 02Test guardrails directly, not just the model behind them.
- 03Treat a guardrail failure as an incident, not a rare exception to ignore.
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§7.4 · Edition 1.0 · Guardrails and rules as a control layer