The number that was never supposed to be a constant

Somewhere in every agent stack, confidence becomes a float and floats become politics. Wave 2’s story is about dragging that politics into the light: P8 (confidence / review policy) and P9 (scoped config resolution) are how HUMΛN keeps “magic routing” from becoming “mystery nudging.”

From literal to legible

The HumanOS public route once treated 0.7 as folklore. Now humanos_org_policies.policy_json can carry confidence_review.fourth_law_confidence_threshold, merged with defaults in @human/humanos. GET /v1/humanos/policy/effective exposes the effective threshold and learning_requires_approval so operators can answer “why did this escalate?” without reading TypeScript.

That is inspectability: the default is still gentle, but the override is documented, scoped, and tested.

Magic first, power second — for real

Magic means a tenant routes work without assembling a policy graph by hand. Power means when they tighten the Fourth Law to 0.55 for a regulated division, the system behaves — it does not silently ignore JSON because nobody wired the field.

Trust expectations

Use cases:

1. Given a compliance officer auditing escalations, when they call policy/effective, then they see the numeric threshold and learning gate — not a shrug.
2. Given a product team testing a stricter org, when they PUT policy JSON via /v1/humanos/policy/org, then routing pre-checks honor the new threshold on the next request.
3. Given an engineer fearing “silent preference drift,” when they read learning_requires_approval, then they know durable adaptation stays behind explicit rules.

Spirit: The system should feel confident when it acts and honest when it is unsure — never the reverse.

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Extended narrative — precedence you can test

Org JSON is not a second religion sitting beside code defaults; it is an overlay with deterministic merge rules. That matters because “we set it in the DB” must never mean “we forked semantics.” Precedence tests spell out cases: empty overlay, partial finance, nested safety domains, blocklist growth, task-context slices, and learning approval toggles. They are boring tests — on purpose. Boring tests are what keep your policy story from becoming folklore.

Admin write lands as PUT /v1/humanos/policy/org, guarded by humanos:admin, merging JSONB keys so operators do not accidentally wipe unrelated domains. Reads stay on GET /policy/effective, returning the merged object a router already trusts. Explainability bundles carry a policy_applied_id derived from the org row timestamp (or a default sentinel), so “why this threshold” has a stable handle for support and audit.

Trust expectation: When someone asks “why 0.42?” the answer cites policy_applied_id + merged fields — not “the model felt like it.”

Given / When / Then (use case 4)

Given two overlays applied sequentially, when operators merge finance ceilings, then unspecified finance keys remain from defaults — no silent nulling.

Given / When / Then (use case 5)

Given a compliance officer, when they compare GET effective JSON to an explain bundle factor, then Fourth Law text matches the merged threshold.

Given / When / Then (use case 6)

Given a malicious client sending non-object policy_json, when PUT validates the body, then they receive field-scoped 400 — no partial writes.