Intent Is Not Policy: The Two-Layer Contract for Production Agents
We keep asking one mechanism to do two different jobs.
We give agents repository instructions describing how they should behave, and then quietly expect those instructions to become a security boundary.
They are not.
This talk introduces the Two-Layer Agent Contract: a practical architecture that separates agent guidance from runtime enforcement.
The guidance plane, expressed through AGENTS.md, tells an agent how to work inside a codebase: conventions, commands, constraints and local context.
The enforcement plane, implemented through agentgateway, controls what capabilities the agent can actually discover and invoke through MCP.
Using a reproducible open-source lab, I will walk through an agent operating inside a repository with scoped AGENTS.md instructions while agentgateway exposes a deliberately constrained MCP tool surface. We will trace allowed, hidden and denied capabilities and show what happens when agent intent and runtime authority disagree.
The result is a reusable blueprint for building agents where context can remain flexible without making authorization probabilistic.
Attendees will get the open-source repository as well.
Darshit Pandya is a Senior Principal Engineer in Platform Engineering at Serko, with more than 16 years of experience designing and evolving cloud-native, distributed, and developer platforms.
His work sits at the intersection of platform engineering, cloud architecture, developer experience, DevSecOps, observability, APIs, and AI-enabled software delivery. He focuses on building scalable engineering platforms, golden paths, Agentic internal developer platforms, secure software delivery practices, and governance models that help engineering teams move faster without compromising reliability, security, or developer autonomy.
Darshit is an AWS Community Builder, an Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) Ambassador, a Hashicorp Ambassador, and the founder of Platform Engineering NZ. He is also an active community organizer and mentor, contributing to the growth of cloud, serverless, platform engineering, and agentic AI communities in New Zealand and internationally.
As a global public speaker, Darshit has presented at AWS re:Invent, AWS Sydney Summits, PlatformCon, NZ Tech Rally, and other technology conferences and community events. His talks are known for connecting real-world engineering challenges with practical architectural patterns, platform thinking, and lessons learned from operating software at scale.
He is particularly interested in the future of platform engineering in an AI-native world: how organisations can make security, governance, observability, and developer experience executable by default, while enabling both humans and AI agents to safely build and operate software at increasing speed.