Priority Matrix (Conflict Resolution)

And the patterns that stand alongside it, or against it —

• alternative-toConflict Competency Gap✕— Architectural gap: current agents cannot resolve complex goal conflicts the way humans do through experience and contextual judgment, even at Progression-Framework Level 3.
• alternative-toDecision Paralysis✕— Anti-pattern: when given equally-weighted conflicting goals, the agent either gets stuck trying to satisfy all simultaneously or oscillates between solutions without converging — the most common LLM response to genuine goal conflicts.
• alternative-toFalse Resolution✕— The agent proposes a compromise that addresses each constraint individually but subtly violates one in joint interpretation, shipping as success but discovered as failure at audit.
• complementsPolicy-as-Code Gate★— Evaluate every proposed agent action against externally-managed machine-readable policies before dispatch, so compliance authorship lives outside the prompt and outside the agent code.
• complementsHuman-in-the-Loop★★— Require explicit human approval at defined points before the agent performs an action.
• complementsModality-Conflict Arbitration★— Have each observation channel emit its own recorded claim, treat disagreement between channels as a detected event, and resolve it against a pre-declared per-claim-type modality authority rather than an implicit fused guess.
• complementsControl-Loop-Mapped Agent Chain·— Give each existing feedback loop in a plant's control chain its own operator agent carrying that loop's control-theoretic context, and resolve their competing proposals with the chain's own deterministic selector logic.
• complementsCo-Tenant Interference Profiling★— Before admitting a new autonomous controller to a fleet acting on one shared physical substrate, profile it in a sandbox against every incumbent, measure pairwise outcome degradation, and gate admission on the measured severity.
• complementsActuation-Scope-Registered Control Loops★— Have every long-lived automated loop declare, in a registry all loops share, the resources it may actuate and the indicator it optimises, so overlapping actuation scope is detectable before any loop runs.