Prior art: what distributed systems already knows
TL;DR: The governance problems that make AI agents unpredictable (unverified completions, state loss between sessions, unconstrained scope) are structurally identical to problems distributed systems engineering solved with audit logs, delivery acknowledgment, state machines, and least-privilege access. The one genuine difference is non-determinism: an agent given the same open-ended task twice will do something different, which means governance needs to front-load constraints rather than just catch failures after. But the rest of the pattern library applies directly. ...