TAPES(Transition AI Patches Enforcement System)

TAPES: Deterministic Governance for Autonomous Enterprise AI The Problem: The Risk of Agentic Autonomy Autonomous AI agents like IBM Bob excel at reasoning and patch generation, but they lack physical boundary awareness. Without strict oversight, an autonomous agent can accidentally overwrite legacy modules, bypass security invariants, or introduce catastrophic structural regressions into mission-critical codebases. The Solution: Runtime Governance TAPES is a deterministic security layer engineered specifically to secure IBM Bob and the watsonx ecosystem. It acts as an absolute runtime gatekeeper, intercepting every code modification payload generated by the IBM Bob API before it touches the local filesystem. How It Works: The Five-Gate Bouncer TAPES routes all LLM outputs through three decoupled execution layers (kernel, runtime, execution), guarded by our custom AST-level Bouncer. The Bouncer validates all patches against strict physical boundaries: Scope Integrity: Prevents "ghost" variable references. Dependency Isolation: Intercepts unauthorized external imports. Structural Containment: Blocks malicious path-traversal attempts. File Protection: Enforces write-locks on sensitive architecture. Empirical Performance & Cost Efficiency In our automated 8-scenario benchmark using live IBM Granite models, TAPES proved its enterprise viability: 100% Production Safety: Unprotected BobShell executions compromised protected files 8/8 times. TAPES successfully intercepted 26 unsafe modifications, achieving a 100% containment rate. 81% Token Reduction: By utilizing retrieval shaping and strict context bounding, TAPES slashed IBM Granite token consumption from 2.91 million to just 530,000—delivering massive compute cost savings while allowing legitimate patches to flow seamlessly. Business Value TAPES transforms unpredictable agentic workflows into secure, cost-effective, and deterministic development pipelines ready for the enterprise.