Unwitnessed Autonomy

The paper defines unwitnessed autonomy: an automated system that takes consequential actions on parties outside its boundary when no party is placed to observe those effects and report them to the operator. The case is Tapstall, a shop-link service for informal and social-commerce merchants. Its test suite passed in full while the live pipeline was mailing non-prospects, sending from another venture's support mailbox, posting into another venture's social account and running duplicate copies of itself. The paper codes 24 defects (11 from the audit, 13 found during the rebuild) into nine classes. Sixteen (67%) are witness gaps, and none of the 24 was found by a test. It proposes a five-point witness map (identity, clock, effect, recipient, stop), four "one-of" rules and seven testable propositions. It is a single pre-revenue case, so its propositions are offered for testing, not as established findings.