AI and agent stop conditions

Agents that loop until done can spend money and credibility fast. Good stop conditions are explicit, testable, and conservative.

What AI does well here

• Suggest budget caps (tokens, time, dollars).
• Identify checkpoints to surface to a human.
• Detect when the agent is making no progress.

What AI cannot do

• Know your business cost of a wrong loop.
• Stop a runaway without infrastructure to kill it.
• Reason about its own failure modes reliably.

Practice this safely

Use a small project example from your own work. The useful move is to compare the AI's draft against your goal, sources, and constraints before you trust it.

1. 1Ask AI to explain stop condition in plain language, then underline anything that sounds uncertain or too broad.
2. 2Give it one detail from "AI and agent stop conditions" and ask for two possible next steps plus one reason each step might be wrong.
3. 3Check human-in-the-loop against a trusted source, teacher, adult, expert, or original document before you use it.