04 of 6 · Anti-pattern
The silent duty
A job stopped firing three weeks ago. Nothing alerted — because nothing distinguishes "no work to do" from "not working."
Silence is the failure mode backward-looking checks can never catch. A queue where 92% of items expire with nobody recorded as deciding; a beautiful roster where every slot "completes" with motion while the delivery ratio sits near zero; a monitor that fires alarms nobody consumes. In each case the absence looks identical to health, and your first notification is a customer.
Approval-queue rows expiring with a NULL decider; coverage reading 100% while duty-delivery diverges; scheduled jobs whose last real outcome is weeks old while their "completed" status stays green; alarms accumulating as rows with no consuming duty.
A duty roster, diffed against reality daily — every responsibility declared with a trigger, an expected outcome, and a deadline, so a miss raises an alarm because nothing happened.
Law 3 (Coverage): duties are schema-declared; "delivered" is dispatcher-verified against the record, never occupant-declared; terminal states require an actor; the daily coverage diff makes silence itself a finding. The reference implementation’s public record includes its miss log — that’s the point.
Official reference: AP-7 · Silent attrition + AP-8 · Schedule theater (Part 10) · Law 3 — the standard’s normative catalog defines ten anti-patterns; this page is the plain-English door into it.
Silent duty — FAQ
We have uptime monitoring and alerting. Isn’t this covered?
Uptime tells you the process is running — which is exactly what performed autonomy looks like. The coverage question is different: of everything that was supposed to happen last week, what happened, what missed, and where is each miss written down? If missed work leaves no trace, your agents can quietly stop doing their jobs forever.
What’s "schedule theater"?
The gamed version of coverage: a roster where every slot completes — with motion. Sensor beats that assert nothing, "done" stamped by the occupant rather than verified by the dispatcher, coverage at 100% while almost nothing real delivers. The standard catches it by comparing the coverage ratio to the delivery ratio; divergence is the finding.
Does your fleet have this one?
The free Reality Check probes for this pattern against your own record — read-only, aggregate-only, no signup to read your result.
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