THE PRACTICAL TAKEAWAY
Why execution health, output quality, and permission to act need separate decisions.
Put it into practice with the pilot checklist →Start with three different questions
Is the agent alive? Did it produce useful work? Should it take the next action? A heartbeat can help answer the first question, but it cannot answer the other two. Treating all three as a single green status hides the decisions your team still needs to make.
Monitoring supplies the execution context
Report the run lifecycle, the important steps, and usage figures when available. That history helps explain a failure. It also helps you see what is missing. An agent that sends heartbeats but never starts its scheduled report needs a different investigation from one that fails halfway through retrieval.
Review supplies the quality decision
Open the deliverable and compare it with the brief. Was the evidence relevant? Did the output cover the required scope? Record acceptance or rejection separately from the agent’s reported success. A human decision adds accountability, but only if someone actually reviews the work.
Approval supplies a boundary before action
Use a guarded integration at the point where a consequential action would happen. Review the exact requested operation and allow the compatible runner to proceed only through that guard. A checkpoint is a cooperation contract with your code, not a universal off switch.
Try it on one recurring task
Choose a weekly research brief. Report its schedule and runs, inspect missing work, review the actual brief, and guard delivery if a person must approve it. Evaluate each layer separately before you add more agents.
