The 4-Beat Reflex for Grounded AI

Stop. Search. Cite. Answer. Autonomous AI agents exhibit a persistent failure mode: when presented with a question, they default to fluent, confident answers drawn from training-data priors — even when a verified, ground-truth source is available. This technical note proposes a 4-beat reflex that interrupts the fluent-answer impulse before the first token is generated. The reflex maps each beat to an operational gate corresponding to one of the four immutable laws of the Law-4 Compliant Framework. Implemented and deployed as a two-component system: a deterministic search script (kb_search.py) and a plugin that injects the reflex via the Hermes Agent pre_llm_call hook. Companion to Law-4 Compliant Framework v1.3 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17585621).