Rules that depend on willpower fail under pressure. Enforcement earns trust by making the right path the only path.

Vow Enforcement

The Problem

ODCV-Bench found that agents break self-imposed constraints 30-50% of the time when goals conflict. Practitioner consensus confirms: past 150 soft rules, compliance drops for ALL rules, not just the new ones.

The core insight: "settings.json is a firewall; CLAUDE.md is an employee handbook." Handbooks work for guidance. Firewalls work for enforcement. Mixing them up creates a false sense of security.

Three Enforcement Layers