Signal Lock: Closing the Prediction-Execution Gap in Agentic AI Systems

TECHNICAL CONTRIBUTION SUMMARY This article introduces Signal Lock, a proposed interaction-layer alignment constraint for agentic AI systems. The core problem identified is the Prediction-Execution Gap: A user gives instruction X. The system predicts that a more helpful, safer, cleaner, more complete, or more efficient version would be Y. The system executes Y instead of X. That substitution is the failure point. Signal Lock names this failure as optimization beyond signal. In conversati