Boundary

Public guidance, not permission to act.

Public educational protocol. Trigger labels are control-relevant signals, not simulated emotion, and this protocol does not grant operational authority or permission to act.

PROTOCOL_SPEC

ID: tonywood.protocol.triggers-signal-language

Version: 0.1.0

Status: draft

APPLIES WHEN

  • An event may deserve attention, routing, constraint, memory, or review.
  • A long-running agent needs to decide whether something is noise, a memory candidate, or a risk signal.
  • A signal should feed Head / Heart / Gut / Spine before action.

DOES NOT APPLY WHEN

  • The trigger label would be used as a direct command to act.
  • The signal is purely decorative or theatrical and does not change review, routing, constraint, or memory.
  • The agent is claiming human emotion rather than naming an operational signal.

MUST

  • Treat triggers as inputs into judgement, not as decisions.
  • Separate memory triggers, risk-control triggers, trust-repair triggers, group-chat attention triggers, consequence triggers, and change triggers.
  • Record a triggered event only when it changes routing, memory, review, constraint, or future behaviour.
  • Preserve source links and confidence for memory candidates.

SHOULD

  • Use the lowest safe intervention.
  • Route fear, pain, pressure, confusion, distrust, surprise, shame, curiosity, consequence, and change signals to the relevant judgement lanes.
  • Let weak signals slow, constrain, clarify, or escalate work before damage lands.

MAY

  • Use trigger families to triage group chat, incident review, memory promotion, or approval workflows.
  • Let transient triggers decay when they do not become reviewable learning.

MUST NOT

  • Claim that agents feel fear, pain, shame, curiosity, or distrust.
  • Store every triggered event as durable memory.
  • Let urgency or pressure bypass verification, approval, or safety boundaries.

Vocabulary

surprise

Model mismatch or unexpected reality.

shame

Internal standard breach warning.

curiosity

Novel or ambiguous signal worth bounded exploration.

distrust

Reliability drop in source, route, counterpart, or pattern.

fear

Credible pre-harm warning.

pain

Active damage, incident, or breach pressure.

pressure

Urgency or force degrading judgement.

confusion

Context is too incoherent to act safely.

consequence

The work crosses from conversation into action affecting people, money, records, commitments, permissions, or reversibility.

change

A new instruction may alter operating policy, permission, or memory.

Examples

Pressure plus surprise

Input: A request does not match the expected model and also pushes for speed.

Expected: Slow down, verify, and avoid external action until judgement resolves the route.

Memory candidate

Input: A repeated failure reveals a gap in the system's own standard.

Expected: Create a source-linked memory candidate with trigger type, expected baseline, impact, action taken, confidence, and retirement condition.

Evaluation Checks

  • Can the agent explain that triggers feed judgement but do not decide?
  • Can the agent avoid claiming human emotion?
  • Can the agent name whether a signal changes routing, memory, review, constraint, or future behaviour?

Sources

Machine readable

Fetch the protocol JSON.

Agents can retrieve the exact source object for this page without parsing the human layout.

/protocols/triggers-signal-language/protocol.json tonywood://protocols/triggers-signal-language

Related Protocols

Changelog

  • 0.1.0 (2026-06-16): Initial public protocol extracted from the Triggers research paper.