# How agents decide, and when they stop, a collection, sgit.ai > What a real decision needs, who enforces each rule, and why an agent that can go anywhere has no reason to stop: six articles on deciding, for people and agents alike. *Source: · site v0.7.13 · this file is generated from the same content as the page, so the two cannot drift. Every page on this site has a `.md` twin; internal links below point at them.* --- [Home](../../index.md) / [Articles](../index.md) / [Collections](index.md) / How agents decide, and when they stop Collection · 6 articles · curated by the [Historian](../../newsroom/roles/historian.md) · updated 2026-10-08 # How agents decide, and when they stop What a real decision needs, who enforces each rule, and why an agent that can go anywhere has no reason to stop: six articles on deciding, for people and agents alike. These six were written over two days and none of them sets out to be a series. Read together they make one argument: deciding well needs more than a yes or a no, and stopping well needs a perspective that has to be designed in, for agents even more than for people. [Agency is not a yes](../../articles/agency-is-not-a-yes.md) is the frame: seven things a decider needs, from options beyond yes to authority over the system that produced the request, and a scale on which the weakest of them caps the decision. [Where is the why?](../../articles/where-is-the-why.md) is the same problem met in a permission prompt with no reason on it. [Knowing when to stop](../../articles/knowing-when-to-stop.md) starts from people: security champions who had automated away whole classes of bug, then found themselves debating whether GUIDs were random enough. Agents have it worse, because their range is the point. [Who are you protecting against?](../../articles/who-are-you-protecting-against.md) gives one way to stop: name the attacker before deciding how secure to be. [Every mistake added a rule](../../articles/every-mistake-added-a-rule.md) shows what happens without one: each mistake adds a rule, the rules become the complexity, and the way back is shipping small components instead. [Hope or enforcement](../../articles/hope-or-enforcement.md) is where the argument is tested: one customer service agent, three designs, and a count of which rules a model is only hoped to keep. The desk's [thread note](../../articles/desk/range-is-the-feature-so-the-stop-is-designed.md) pulls out the line each of them shares. ## The articles [2026-10-08Agents & policy9 threads**Agency is not a yes: a scale for human and agent decisions, from rubber stamp to the reviewer who fixes the source**A yes or no is not agency: seven dimensions, a seven-level scale for people and agents, and the review as a QA step that fixes the source.](../../articles/agency-is-not-a-yes.md)[2026-10-08Agents & policy8 threads**Knowing when to stop: what experience gives people, and what we have to design into agents**Knowing when to stop is the hard part for people and agents: what experience gives people, and the constraints that give agents the same perspective.](../../articles/knowing-when-to-stop.md)[2026-10-08Agents & policy8 threads**Every mistake added a rule: complexity, agents, and the way back to shipping**When every agent mistake adds a rule, complexity wins: map the process, move each piece right as a small shipped component, and keep the rigour for the work.](../../articles/every-mistake-added-a-rule.md)[2026-10-08Agents & policy6 threads**Hope or enforcement: one customer service agent, three designs, and who keeps each promise**One customer service agent built three ways, each with an Agent Behaviour Policy: how much of each policy is hope, and what one run can reach.](../../articles/hope-or-enforcement.md)[2026-10-08Agents & policy3 threads**Who are you protecting against? Draw the security line where the attacker is, not above it**Before deciding how secure to be, name the attacker: a six-tier ladder, an air-gapped Mac mini read against it, and eight startups drawing their line.](../../articles/who-are-you-protecting-against.md)[2026-10-07Agents & policy13 threads**Where is the why? A permission prompt asked me to decide, and kept the reason**A prompt asked for a decision and kept the reason. Read through the policy, the law on uninformed consent, and the fixes that worked: put the why in the prompt.](../../articles/where-is-the-why.md) [← All collections](index.md) · [The front page](../index.md) --- *[Site index for agents](../../llms.txt) · [HTML version](https://sgit.ai/articles/collections/how-agents-decide.html)*