Agents don’t fail because they are too dumb.
They fail because they are allowed to act when they shouldn’t.
What people describe as “agents thinking wildly” is more accurately described as agents running wild.
They proceed without confirmation.
They invent missing context.
They cross execution boundaries without awareness.
This happens because most agent systems share a critical flaw:
The model decides when it is allowed to act.
This is an architectural mistake.
A reliable agent system must introduce an explicit control layer—one that does not generate text and does not interpret meaning.
Its job is simple:
Decide whether execution is allowed
Decide whether confirmation is required
Decide whether the process must stop
A minimal controllable runtime can be described with explicit states:
INPUT_COLLECTION
AWAITING_CONFIRMATION
EXECUTION_ALLOWED
EXECUTION_BLOCKED
The model is only permitted to generate output in one state:
EXECUTION_ALLOWED.
Every other state exists to prevent the model from “helpfully” running ahead.
This is not about making AI less capable.
It is about making systems deployable.
Freedom creates demos.
Constraints create systems.
Until execution permission is removed from the model itself, agents will continue to sound confident—and behave unpredictably.
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