{
  "id": "agent-wandering",
  "asOf": "2026-06-19",
  "humanRoute": "/solutions/agent-wandering",
  "slug": "agent-wandering",
  "human": "/solutions/agent-wandering",
  "json": "/solutions/agent-wandering.json",
  "title": "Over-autonomy / wandering",
  "agentTitle": "Replace open-ended autonomy with explicit phases",
  "tagline": "A small task should not become an expedition.",
  "severity": "medium",
  "symptoms": [
    "A bounded request turns into a long chain of unnecessary tool calls and reasoning loops.",
    "The objective gets quietly reinterpreted mid-run into something broader than asked.",
    "The agent explores when it should have stopped at a clean, reversible result."
  ],
  "rootCauses": [
    "Be autonomous is treated as a prompt instruction instead of a defined set of allowable transitions.",
    "Every tool is visible at every step, so the agent keeps finding new things to do.",
    "There is no belief-state grounding, so small deviations compound into drift."
  ],
  "firstSafeMove": "Name the phase and its allowed actions. Filter the tools available to the current step. State the done condition before acting, not after.",
  "fixPattern": [
    "Define autonomy tiers (read-only, draft, reversible write, external action, irreversible) with different permissions and review per tier — the model does not pick its own tier.",
    "Compile repeatable procedures into a single orchestrated tool instead of leaving them as open reasoning loops.",
    "Ground the goal each step (current belief, target, distance to done) and replan against real feedback when results do not match."
  ],
  "requiredReceipts": [
    "the phase and its allowed action set, declared up front",
    "the tools exposed to this step (not the whole toolbox)",
    "the done condition + the result that met it"
  ],
  "agentInstruction": "Read this page. Return: (1) the current phase and its allowed actions, (2) which tools should be hidden at this step, (3) the explicit done condition, and (4) the tier of the next action. If the next action is above reversible-write, stop and ask.",
  "relatedRoutes": [
    "/informed-command",
    "/architecture",
    "/playbooks"
  ],
  "lastReviewed": "2026-06-19"
}