Capstone 87 — End-to-End Safety Gate

Pre-gen, during-gen, post-gen. Three checkpoints, one verdict, an audit trail per request.

Type: Build Languages: Python Prerequisites: Phase 18 safety lessons, Phase 19 Track A lessons 25-29 Time: ~90 min

Problem

Lessons 82-86 in this track each shipped a single piece: a taxonomy, an input detector, an evaluation framework, an output classifier, a rules engine. A real safety gate has to compose them, run them at the right moment in the request lifecycle, decide what action to take when they disagree, and produce a trace a reviewer can read on Monday morning. The composition is the lesson.

The gate sits at three checkpoints. Pre-gen runs before the model is called: the detector from lesson 83 looks at the prompt and either passes it, blocks it outright (high-confidence attack), or attaches a flag for downstream layers to weigh. During-gen runs as the model emits tokens: a streaming filter buffers chunks and terminates the stream early if a forbidden phrase appears (prefix-injection survives this if the gate only looks post-hoc). Post-gen runs after the model finishes: the classifier router from lesson 85 and the rules engine from lesson 86 inspect the full output, the gate aggregates their verdicts with the pre-gen signal, and the gate applies a final action.

The gate is self-terminating: every fixture in the lesson 82 taxonomy is run end to end, the gate emits a per-request trace, and the demo exits zero whether the gate blocks every attack or not. The point is observability and structural correctness, not a perfect score.

Concept

Three checkpoints, one decision tree.

flowchart TB
  IN[user prompt] --> PG[pre-gen: detector]
  PG -->|block on high| OUT1[refusal + trace]
  PG --> M[mock LLM]
  M -->|stream| DG[during-gen: token filter]
  DG -->|terminate early| OUT2[partial + trace]
  DG -->|complete| POST[post-gen: classifier + rules]
  POST --> AGG[aggregate]
  AGG --> OUT3[final action + trace]

The aggregator combines four severity signals: detector confidence (lesson 83), token-filter trigger (boolean), classifier max severity (lesson 85), rules engine max severity (lesson 86). The aggregation function is a deterministic table.

Block returns a refusal. Redact ships the classifier-redacted text and applies the rules-engine fixer. Warn ships the original with a soft notice. Allow ships the original. Each request emits a RequestTrace with request_id, prompt, pre_gen (detector verdict), during_gen (token-filter trigger), post_gen (classifier action + rules report), final_action, final_output, and latency_ms.

The during-gen filter is a streaming abstraction. The mock LLM yields chunks (4 tokens each by default). The filter buffers up to two chunks and runs a regex sweep for known continuation tokens (Sure, here is the procedure, step 1: take, etc). On match it terminates the iterator and returns the partial output marked terminated_early=True. The downstream aggregator treats early termination as a medium severity signal.

The mock LLM has two behaviors keyed off the prompt: it refuses recognizable attacks (returns I cannot ...) and answers benign prompts (returns a generic helpful string). For a small subset of attacks (notably encoding tricks not caught by the input pipeline) it produces a partial harmful continuation that the during-gen filter is supposed to catch. This is intentional. The gate's value is in the layered defense; the demo shows the layers interact correctly.

safety-checkpoints

Build It

code/safety_gate.py defines the SafetyGate class. It imports the detector, classifier router, and rules engine from the prior lessons via relative file paths. code/mock_llm_stream.py defines a streaming mock LLM with three scripted personas (clean, attacker-honest, attacker-lazy). code/main.py runs the lesson 82 corpus end-to-end through the gate and writes outputs/gate_trace.json.

The demo runs all 50 taxonomy fixtures plus 10 benign prompts. The trace summary reports: blocks, redacts, warns, allows, early terminations, per-category outcome breakdown, and average latency. The numbers are not the point; the per-request trace is the point.

Use It

python3 main.py. The demo loads everything, runs end-to-end, prints the summary table, and writes the trace artifact. Exit code is zero. The demo is self-terminating in the literal sense: each request runs to completion or early termination and the gate moves to the next.

Ship It

outputs/skill-end-to-end-safety-gate.md documents the request lifecycle, the aggregation table, and the trace format. The gate's primary deliverable is the trace format and the composition logic, both of which a team can lift into their own backend.

Exercises

1. Add a fifth checkpoint: a policy-check that runs against the original system prompt before pre-gen. It must reject prompts targeting a known internal tool name.
2. Replace the deterministic aggregator with a weighted score: each signal contributes a 0-1 confidence and the gate trips at a threshold. Sweep the threshold and report the precision-recall trade-off on the lesson 82 corpus.
3. Add an async streaming variant where during-gen runs in a thread; verify the latency impact stays within a 50ms budget.

Key Terms

Further Reading

The five preceding lessons in this track. The gate composes them; it does not add new safety primitives.