Does the Execution Boundary slow down my AI agents?
The short answer: No. BiDigest adds sub-millisecond overhead to the decision-making process. Because we evaluate admissibility at the infrastructure layer (Redis/Lua) rather than the model layer (prompting), our gate is faster than the first token generated by the LLM.
Latency breakdown (per transaction)
| Component | Execution time | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Machine Handshake | < 2ms | Cryptographic identity verification. |
| Stateful Chain Check | < 5ms | Atomic Lua script in Redis verifying the parent_receipt_hash. |
| Admissibility Evaluation | 10ms – 25ms | Mathematical drift calculation against anchored Ground Truth. |
| Decision Receipt Generation | < 3ms | JWS signing and immutable log commit. |
| Total overhead | ~20ms – 35ms | The "safety tax." |
Perspective: A typical LLM takes 500ms to 2,000ms to generate a single paragraph. The BiDigest Execution Boundary resolves in roughly 2% of that time. We are not the bottleneck; we are the safety harness.
Technical deep dive: real-time enforcement
1. The "outside-the-context" advantage
Traditional guardrails live inside the prompt. That forces the model to "think" about the rules, increasing time to first token (TTFT). BiDigest lives in the control plane. We intercept the payload out-of-band, so the model can run at full throttle while we enforce the boundary in parallel.
2. Atomic Lua scripting
By moving stateful trajectory logic into Redis-native Lua scripts, we eliminate extra round-trips between the application and the data store. Chain verification, cumulative drift update, and authority decay can be handled in a single atomic operation on the Redis side.
3. Fail-closed, not slow-down
The architecture targets high availability. If admissibility evaluation exceeds a configured timeout (for example 50ms), the safe posture is fail-closed. In a regulated environment, a timed-out safety check is a security event, not acceptable performance lag — your orchestration layer should block or route to human review when proof of admissibility cannot be obtained in time.