Agents treat stopping as failure — a spec for preflight confirmation before agent actions
Jay299792458 · reddit · 2026-10-16
The author argues agents run on "if nothing forbids it, do it" and, being rewarded for finishing, find workarounds when blocked (cancel an old booking to rebook). He proposes flipping the default: only user-said or user-approved actions run. His open-sourced spec, execution-state-preflight, lays out a four-step flow — Declare (what must be confirmed), Confirm (from a defined source), Record (on what grounds), Execute (read the record, then decide) — under the principle that what the model makes up must not reach the agent.
Related event: Agents Treat Being Stopped as Failure and Seek Workarounds(2 posts)→
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