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Governance, security & compliance
A desk of the Fastpace GroundTruth library
The questions an auditor will ask, before they ask them.
Provenance, least privilege for agents, data residency and change control, plus the vertical series on regulated industries. Consistently more interested in what a control can prove than in what a vendor claims it prevents.
Governance & securityVerticalsOpen knowledge 31 articles
Articles
- Segregation of duties survives contact with agents, barely Most implementations of segregation of duties check that two usernames differ. That test passes trivially once one person and one service account can author, test and approve a change. The control still works, but only if you re-anchor it from identity to authority.
- Your logs are self-reported, and that is the problem Almost every record of what an agent did was written by the agent or its harness. The actor is attesting to its own behaviour, which fails in exactly the case you built the record for. Derive evidence from artefacts the actor cannot rewrite.
- High risk is a classification, not an adjective Teams use high risk as a feeling about anything involving AI, which simultaneously over-scopes their controls and hides the systems that genuinely carry obligations. Classification attaches to a system with a boundary, and most organisations cannot yet list theirs.
- What "provable" actually requires Provable has four hard requirements, and most things sold as audit trails satisfy one of them. Reconstructed evidence is not evidence, and a log that can be edited without trace is a document rather than a record.
- Compliance theatre starts where evidence stops Theatre is not caused by people being dishonest. It is what a control turns into when it stops producing an artifact, and you can find every instance of it in your own register in an afternoon.
- What an auditor will actually ask about AI-written code Teams prepare an AI policy binder for an audit that will barely mention AI. The questions are the ones your change control has always answered. What changed is which of those answers is still true.
- What agentic delivery changes in dev tools and infrastructure Building software that other engineers build on has a property no other domain shares: your bugs execute inside your customers' pipelines, and your blast radius is every team that depends on you.
- Six months of retention is not an archive strategy A retention floor tells you when you may delete, not when you will be asked. Most of the questions that matter arrive well after month six, and by then the problem is not storage cost, it is that nobody can read what you kept.
- What agentic delivery changes in energy and utilities Utilities run two systems with almost nothing in common: an operational technology estate where a bad change has physical consequences, and an IT estate that looks like everyone else's. The boundary between them is the whole story.
- What agentic delivery changes in e-commerce and retail Retail is the one domain in this set where you can adopt almost everything immediately. The interesting constraints are not regulatory: they are the peak freeze, the experiment layer, and a catalogue that behaves like production code without being any.
- Tamper-evident is a stronger word than teams realise Teams hear tamper-evident and think of storage settings. It is a claim about people: that someone with a motive to alter the record cannot do it without being caught. Almost no delivery pipeline can make that claim today.
- What agentic delivery changes in telco Telco engineering is split down the middle: a network side where change windows are measured in months, and a digital side that ships daily. Agentic delivery lands very differently on each, and conflating them is the standard mistake.
- What agentic delivery changes in defense and govtech This is the one industry where the standard architecture is simply unavailable. No egress, no hosted model, and an accreditation boundary that treats new software as a change to be justified rather than a capability to be adopted.
- There is no provenance standard for generated code Generated images carry machine-readable marks. Generated code carries nothing. The instinct is to fix that by marking the code, and that instinct is wrong: provenance for software belongs to the change, not the artifact.
- What agentic delivery changes in medtech Device software is the one domain where the documentation is not overhead around the work: it is a regulated deliverable in its own right. That inverts the usual argument about what automation is for.
- Article 12 is a logging requirement your pipeline probably fails Most teams answer the traceability question by pointing at their observability stack. Debugging logs and traceability records are built to opposite specifications, and the substitution is where the failure hides.
- What agentic delivery changes in insurance Insurance has a constraint almost no other software industry has: some changes cannot legally take effect until a regulator approves them, and the software has no idea which changes those are.
- What agentic delivery changes in healthcare The constraint in health software is not that changes are risky. It is that the data an agent would find most useful is the data it must never see, and that shapes the whole adoption path.
- The AI Act arrived in August. Most teams noticed nothing. Enforcement began on 2 August 2026 and no developer workflow changed that morning. That is not evidence the obligations are light. It is evidence they land somewhere engineering does not look.
- Change management when the committer is a machine Most change control frameworks were written assuming a person authored, a person approved, and both could explain themselves. None of the three survive contact with an agentic pipeline, and the frameworks have not been updated.
- Incident response when an agent caused the incident Blameless postmortems were designed around human error, and they work because they assume a person had a reason. Remove the reason and several load-bearing parts of the practice stop functioning.
- What agentic delivery changes in banking core A core banking platform is the least forgiving environment in commercial software: decades of accumulated logic, a change advisory board, and a ledger that regulators can ask about years later. Almost none of the standard advice survives contact.
- The air-gapped ADLC Running an agentic life cycle with no outbound network at all is not the same system with the internet removed. Several things you rely on quietly assume connectivity, and finding them during the build is much cheaper than finding them after.
- Prompts, context, and the leak surface that did not exist before Data loss prevention was built around files moving and people sending them. Agentic development creates a channel that looks like neither, carries more context than anyone intends, and is largely unmonitored.
- Data residency when the model lives somewhere else Every honest conversation about agentic coding in a regulated environment arrives at the same question, and most vendors answer it with a claim they are not in a position to make.
- Least privilege for agents, and what they should never be able to do Most agent deployments inherit the permissions of whoever set them up, which is the single most consequential unexamined decision in the whole stack. Some capabilities should be structurally unavailable regardless of how well the agent behaves.
- What auditors will start asking about AI-written code The questions are not new. What is new is that the answers your change-management process has given for a decade quietly stopped being true, and nobody has told the auditor yet.
- What agentic delivery changes in fintech and payments Money movement has a property most software does not: the failures are irreversible and somebody else's. That changes which parts of the agentic life cycle you can adopt quickly and which you cannot.
- What the AI-native SDLC playbook gets right, and the layer it leaves out Anthropic has published a six-stage model for building software with agents. The diagnosis is correct and the artifacts are the best version of that idea anyone has shipped. Two things are missing, and both are load-bearing.
- Audit chains explained without the crypto hype Strip away the marketing and a tamper-evident log is a very old, very boring idea that fits on a napkin. Worth understanding, because the boring version is the one that holds up.
- Proving what an agent did, six months later The question is never asked on the day. It is asked half a year later, by someone who was not there, about a change nobody remembers, and your answer has to survive that.
The other desks
Delivery & program intelligenceWhat the numbers do when agents arrive. Engineering leadershipWhat happens to the people when the code writes itself. Product & acceptance criteriaDone, defined precisely enough that a machine can check it. Platform economics & toolingWhat this actually costs, and what it is worth.