PAT-0400 - Unbounded Scope

A structural condition where an operation, authority, rule, or expansion has no declared upper bound, boundary, or termination condition.

Primary Lenses

LEN-0220 - Isolation Boundary Lens
Evaluates whether structural constraints, effects, and regions remain contained within declared boundaries.
LEN-0160 - Constraint Sufficiency Lens
Evaluates whether declared constraints are sufficient to eliminate structural degrees of freedom.

LEN-0190 - Escalation Gradient Lens
Measures structural growth or intensification across sequential executions, states, or transitions.

Task Has No Clear Limit
The task does not declare where the AI should stop, what is out of scope, or what counts as enough work.
Too Many Tool Calls
The AI or agent makes more tool calls, searches, retrievals, API calls, or integration actions than the task requires or permits.

AI Adds Work Not Requested
The AI adds tasks, steps, analysis, checks, changes, or follow-up work that the user did not ask for.
AI Touches Unrelated Scope
The AI affects, edits, analyzes, changes, or reasons over material outside the scope of the requested task.
Answer Has Too Many Paths
The answer presents too many possible paths, interpretations, options, or next steps without enough structure to choose among them.
Hallucinated Fields
The AI adds fields, keys, attributes, columns, or structured elements that were not declared, requested, or allowed by the expected schema.
Prompt Does Not Say What to Exclude
The prompt declares what to include but does not declare what should be excluded, allowing unwanted scope, sources, content, or actions into the result.
Single Step Carries Too Many Decisions
One prompt, workflow step, review stage, or agent action carries too many decisions for the system or user to evaluate cleanly.

0.1.0 — 2026-05-10T00:00:00Z — Created

Promoted reviewed Pattern ontology entry: Unbounded Scope.

Receipt impact: None