Boundary omission

When a deployment composes without a boundary, and what stops that meaning too much.

The case for it

The defer side of a boundary is routing: hand this to the role that owns it. A deployment where that role is not a seat has nowhere to route, so the rule reads as a stop rather than a handoff, and the agent defers work nobody will pick up. A single-agent deployment hits this on every boundary it defers.

A request states the absence directly:

compose {
    role "eval"
    boundary-omit "modify-live-backend" "seek-external-validation"
}

The omission removes the boundary from the composed set entirely: no body in the bundle, no name on the identity card, no entry in the manifest. Naming a boundary whose body is absent is worse than either, because the card then describes doctrine the agent cannot read.

Three refusals keep the knob from meaning something it should not:

• An unknown boundary name fails rather than no-opping, matching the rest of the request parser.
• A boundary the role owns cannot be omitted. An owner losing its own boundary is a larger claim than a deferrer losing one, and it would leave the boundary with no side that holds it.
• A boundary the role does not activate fails too, so a stale request surfaces instead of quietly expressing nothing.

The decision trace records each omission as an excluded profile decision. A bundle that quietly lacks a boundary is worse than one that never had it, because the review surface stops telling the truth.