What is the runtime law?
Four conditions every automated action must satisfy before it is allowed to run.
Definition
runtime law (n.) – the standing condition that no automated work may execute unless it runs for an identified purpose, by a named role, through a recorded access grant, and on a defined schedule or trigger.
Each clause rules out a specific way automated systems go wrong. For a purpose rules out work that runs because it always has. By a role rules out anonymous action nobody owns. Through an access record rules out ambient credentials that grant more than the task needs. On a schedule rules out processes that run at times nobody chose.
Stated as four conditions it sounds bureaucratic. In practice it is the difference between a company you can audit and a collection of scripts whose combined behavior nobody can describe.
The law is enforced rather than announced. A preflight that refuses to run an unregistered job is worth more than a paragraph asking people to register their jobs.
The most common violation is the useful script somebody ran once by hand and then scheduled. It has a purpose and a schedule but no owning role and no access record, and it is invisible until it breaks something.
Why it is code and not policy
Prose advises and code constrains. A rule written in a document is followed by the people who read the document, which is a shrinking fraction of the actors as more of the work becomes automated. The same rule written as a gate is followed by everything.
This is the general pattern rather than a rule about this particular law: any constraint that must hold regardless of interpretation belongs in code. Anything that requires judgment stays in prose, because encoding judgment produces rules that are wrong in the cases that matter.
What it costs
Friction, and the friction is real. Registering a job takes longer than running it. The honest tradeoff is that the cost is paid at the moment of creation, when it is small, rather than at the moment of investigation, when something has gone wrong and nobody can say what is running.