QuoxGuard implant

Much as the amygdala processes incoming stimuli for potential danger and can trigger protective responses before conscious awareness catches up, QuoxGuard monitors continuously and intervenes when risk is detected.

It enforces six rules: stall detection, error cascade recognition, budget burn rate monitoring, objective staleness checks, known failure pattern matching, and loop detection. Loop detection fingerprints errors and catches three or more identical failures in sequence, preventing agents from repeating the same broken action indefinitely.

Guard operates across four authority levels: alert, pause, abort task, and abort objective. At the lower levels, it warns and gives the system a chance to self-correct. At the higher levels, it stops execution outright.

Per-resource circuit breakers (SSH, LLM, collector) trip after repeated failures at the execution chokepoints and fail fast while open, with a half-open probe before recovery, so cascading failures stop propagating across the fleet. Guard also queries the wisdom store for known dangerous patterns, applying institutional memory to threat assessment.

Guard is deliberately independent. It does not take direction from Executive or any other implant in the action chain. This separation ensures that the safety system cannot be overridden by the system it monitors. Trust in autonomous operations depends on this independence.