What do you mean by "actually governing the agents at the system level", and how is it different from "herding cats"?

Herding cats is treating the LLM's context window as your state machine. You're constantly prompt-engineering it to remember the rules, hoping it doesn't hallucinate or silently drop constraints over a long session.

System-level governance means the LLM is completely stripped of orchestration rights. It becomes a stateless, untrusted function. The state lives in a rigid, external database (like SQLite). The database dictates the workflow, hands the LLM a highly constrained task, and runs external validation on the output before the state is ever allowed to advance. The LLM cannot unilaterally decide a task is done.

I got so frustrated with the former while working on a complex project that I paused it to build a CLI to enforce the latter. Planning to drop a Show HN for it later today, actually.