# Forge vs No Governance

**Short answer.** Running an AI coding agent with nothing around it is the
real, default alternative to Forge — not another product. It works, until a
retry loop doesn't converge, spend spikes past what anyone budgeted, or one
destructive command runs with nobody watching. Forge doesn't change what your
agent can do; it adds checks outside the model that can refuse to let a run
continue, regardless of what the agent believes it did.

## What each one actually is

**No governance** means whatever safety exists lives entirely inside the
model's own judgment and whatever prompt or rules file you wrote. Nothing
outside the inference loop can verify what happened or stop it from
happening again.

**Maistik Forge** runs the same agent, the same way, with a local binary
enforcing a small set of controls alongside it — checks that read
deterministic evidence and return a non-zero exit, independent of the
model's own account of what it did.

## Feature comparison

| | No governance | Maistik Forge |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Runs your existing agent unmodified | Yes | Yes |
| Can stop a runaway retry loop | No | Yes — [verify circuit-breaker](/harness/circuit-breaker) |
| Caps spend before it's a surprise | No | Yes — [spend budget](/harness/budget) |
| Blocks a destructive command before it runs | Entirely up to the model | Yes — [guardrails gate](/harness/guardrails) |
| Scans for leaked secrets before commit | Only if you built it | Yes — [`forge secscan`](/harness/secscan) |
| Record of what happened, independent of the agent | Whatever the host logs | [Append-only timeline](/harness/timeline) |
| Cost | $0 | [Paid annual licence](/pricing) |

## Questions people actually ask

### Isn't the model's own safety training enough?

That's a property of the model's judgment, not something you can verify
independently, and it varies between agents and between versions of the same
agent. Forge doesn't argue with the model — it checks evidence outside it: a
real exit code from a real command, not a claim.

### When is "no governance" genuinely the right call?

Solo, low-stakes, exploratory work — where a mistake costs an afternoon, not
real money or a production path. That's true of Forge generally, not just
this comparison: see [when you should not buy
Forge](/compare/#when-you-should-not-buy-forge).