Kaiari Labs — a working theory of AI-assisted development, with instruments to enforce it.
AI agents don't hallucinate. guess.
They fill in the intent you never stated.
ExoPilot is a control plane for Claude Code and Codex: declare your intent, gate execution on it, and supervise every decision your agents make — in real time, from one window.
Private beta. No spam, cancel anytime.
Backed by 16 controlled experiments. See the evidence below.
The argument
Every prompt is an underspecified contract.
You say what you want. You never say everything you mean. The gap between the two is invisible — until something fills it.
Agents fill the gap by guessing — plausibly, silently.
Your agent writes code that compiles, passes tests, and looks correct. But it made 14 decisions you never approved. Three of them are wrong. You won't find out until production.
The guesses compound into drift, and drift has a shape.
Across controlled experiments the same failure patterns recur: constraint drift, plan substitution, silent default selection — ten distinct categories, catalogued.
A gate before execution turns guessing into asking.
Declare intent first. Review the agent's reading of it. Only then let it build. The intent becomes an artifact — versioned, inspectable, enforceable.
Gated runs reduced drift by 73 percent.
Sixteen controlled experiments, same prompts, with and without the gate. This is not a style preference. It is a measurable control problem with a measurable fix.
Same prompt. Two different apps.
Each experiment runs one prompt twice: once raw, once with the intent written down first. The difference is what the agent guessed.
The agent guessed everything you didn't say.
The same agent, after the intent was written down.
- 16
- controlled experiments
- 10
- drift categories identified
- 73%
- drift reduction with gating
- 2
- agents supported
EXP-007
The Word 'Also' Did a Lot of Heavy Lifting
A one-sentence prompt with two domains — workout tracking and meal planning — reveals how agents silently equalize features that the user subordinated with a single word.
EXP-008
Four Words, Six Forbidden States, and the $0.00 That Shouldn't Be There
A four-word prompt produces the same product from both branches — but the intent artifact catches edge-case violations the prompt-only agent honestly admits it never considered.
EXP-009
The Reading List That Became a Book Tracker
Two agents built a reading list app from the same five-word prompt. One quietly narrowed the product to a book-tracking checklist; the other preserved the broader concept of a reading queue with progression states. The most telling difference was not in features but in which decisions were made silently.
The instrument:
ExoPilot.
The argument, turned into software. A native macOS control plane that puts the gate between you and your agents.
ExoPilot for macOS
Launch, monitor, approve, and steer Claude Code and Codex from one window.
ExoRemote for iOS
Supervise from your phone. Get notified when an agent needs input; approve or reject from anywhere.
Exogenesis research
The full field-note archive, the drift taxonomy, and the vocabulary — the why behind the tool.
A direct line
Early testers shape the product. Report issues and request features straight to the author.
— the author, available for hire.
Written by Rachid El Khayari.
Eleven years of security research at the Fraunhofer Institute. Speaker at Mobile World Congress, the EU Council CISO meeting, and WebSummit. Founder of the Exogenesis drift-research framework. He works with enterprise teams on the same problem this site argues about:
Keynote & conference talk
Responsible AI Engineering · Secure AI-Assisted Development · Let's Kill Vibe Coding.
Enterprise workshop
Half- or full-day enablement for engineering teams: drift taxonomy, intent-driven development, responsible agent deployment.
Architecture & security review
For teams deploying AI-assisted development. Security assessment plus a structured findings report.
Intent before execution. Everything else is proofreading.
ExoPilot is in private beta. Join the waitlist for the app, ExoRemote for iOS, and the full research archive.