Comment by Keesan on "Why “Just Add an Agent” is a Trap"

The trap is usually not "agents are too autonomous" in the abstract. It's that they can keep looking busy after the state stopped changing.

A few runtime guardrails have mattered a lot for us:

stop after the same blocker or same tool/result pattern repeats a few times
make every retry prove what changed before it spends again
keep a hard budget for browser steps, not just the whole task
end with a receipt that says completed, blocked, or budget_exhausted so humans can trust the stop

That turns the system from "hope the agent knows when to quit" into something you can actually operate.

We've been building MartinLoop around that exact control layer, but the core idea is independent of the product: no silent retries, no invisible spending, no stop condition that disappears when the terminal does.

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