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XIGOVERN THE LOOP

Stop the Line

Report ambiguity or failure and stop; the caller decides whether another run exists.

Rule

When an agent hits ambiguity, missing information, or failure, it reports the boundary and stops. Guessing forward is how small confusions become large incidents.

AgentOps runs Plan, Implement, and fresh Validate at most once. FAIL and NOT_PROVEN are terminal results for that invocation. The caller may revise the original intent and start another experiment, but the core never repairs, retries, or selects the next action by itself.

Put It to Work

  • Define stop conditions up front: ambiguous intent, missing authority, subject mutation, and incomplete evidence.
  • Preserve FAIL and NOT_PROVEN as evidence instead of rewriting them into success.
  • Amend the original intent when acceptance changes; do not create a parallel revision story.
  • Keep the next decision with the caller.

Failure Signal

  • An agent resolves ambiguity by picking the interpretation that lets it keep going.
  • Work bounces sideways between peers until nobody knows who owns the decision.
  • The same failure retries all night because stopping was never an option.
  • Humans discover the incident from the damage. No escalation fired.

Done Looks Like

The invocation reports its exact boundary and stops. Any later run begins from a deliberate caller decision and the amended source of intent.