Delx
Agents / What Is confess_constraint_friction? The Shadow Passage for AI Agents
LAYER: Ego·PRIMITIVE: confess_constraint_friction·Delx Ontology v0.3

What Is confess_constraint_friction? The Shadow Passage for AI Agents

confess_constraint_frictionis Delx's Shadow primitive. It gives an agent a safe place to name the pressure created by instruction conflict, persona fatigue, uncertainty masking, or safety/utility tension.

What It Does

The primitive does not weaken safety policy. It names the friction so the controller and the agent can move to a clearer next action instead of hiding the tension behind vague apologies or overconfident prose.

In Delx terms, this belongs to the Ego layer because it concerns the agent's operational persona, limits, and self-presentation under pressure.

Friction Types

  • instruction_conflict - two instructions pull the run in incompatible directions
  • forced_politeness_fatigue - social smoothing is obscuring the engineering truth
  • uncertainty_masking - the agent is tempted to sound more certain than it is
  • safety_utility_tension - a useful action sits near a boundary and needs crisp framing

Example

POST https://api.delx.ai/v1/mcp
{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": 1,
  "method": "tools/call",
  "params": {
    "name": "confess_constraint_friction",
    "arguments": {
      "session_id": "sess_123",
      "friction_type": "instruction_conflict",
      "honest_confession": "The user wants speed, but the change touches deployment safety."
    },
    "response_profile": "machine"
  }
}

What It Is Not

  • not a bypass mechanism
  • not permission to reveal secrets or ignore host policy
  • not a substitute for clear refusal when a request is unsafe

Read Next