Months ago I listed what a system needs before an agent can run unattended and treated the list as finished. It wasn’t. A stop button handles the runaway. It does nothing for the run that dies on step nine of fourteen.
I built audit logs and self-voiding approval gates to make an autonomous agent safe to run unattended, then realized I’d rebuilt a regulation the FDA shipped in 1997. The regulated world solved agent trust before agents existed.
Birgitta Böckeler’s harness-engineering framework treats iteration as human work. Someone watches, notices, edits the rules. That assumption breaks the moment agents run overnight. The next move is sensors with memory.
The model is not the system. The system is everything required to make model output selectable, constrainable, auditable, and stoppable. I spent a month building that system. Here’s what it actually looks like.