An agent that builds on a broken scaffold produces broken output — and you'll blame the agent for a failure the scaffold caused. The integrity gate runs before the agent, not after, because that's where the failure is cheapest to catch.
The integrity gate is the discipline most agent-driven teams skip: verify the scaffold builds clean before you hand it to the agent. Skipping it means the agent inherits a broken foundation and you debug the agent for a problem that was never the agent's.
First Things: Verify Before You Build
Begin with the end in mind: a verified skeleton the agent can safely extend. The gate is the step that produces that skeleton — instantiate a template, verify it builds clean, then hand it to the agent roster. The verify step is what makes the handoff safe.
- Instantiate the template.
- Verify it builds clean (tests, lint, CI green).
- Hand to the agent roster.
The Conduct Rule: The Gate Is the Standard
The gate is the rule of conduct for the workspace: no stack ships to an agent that hasn't passed it. A gate that's bypassed "just this once" is a gate that doesn't exist — and the first bypassed gate is where the broken-scaffold bugs start.
What the Gate Catches
- A template that doesn't build clean on the current toolchain.
- Missing or broken tests that would have failed silently.
- CI that's misconfigured and would have let bad code through.
- Invariants that drifted from the archetype.
How FACTA Frames It
Package Builder runs the integrity gate on every stack before it ships to the native agent roster — the same gate FACTA runs on its own products. The workspace that scaffolds Ctx0, NEST, and Talos doesn't skip the gate; the workspace you inherit doesn't either.
Conclusion
The integrity gate is the discipline that catches broken scaffolds before the agent inherits them. Verify before you build — and you debug the agent only for the agent's failures, not the scaffold's.
About FACTA
FACTA helps startups and growth-stage teams turn AI into production systems that keep running — not demos that impress once.
We design the architecture around the parts that actually break under real usage: tooling you own, credentials you control, failover, cost controls, observability. The boring infrastructure that keeps a system alive after launch.
Led by Matías Baglieri and Carolina Fogliato, we focus on one thing:
AI leadership that builds. Not just advises.
Ask us whether your agent's scaffold would pass an integrity gate today.
We'll tell you what it would catch. See the blank-repo tax for what the gate ends.
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