When should an Agent act, wait, observe, refuse, reconcile, or request a decision?
Treat non-action as a timed, evidence-bearing decision rather than the absence of Agent capability.
01 / Current position
A hypothesis is not the current judgment.
The dossier preserves the live research position. Dated articles preserve the complete evidence and argument that changed it.
Host-local DecisionRequests, explicit UNKNOWN and wait states, deadlines, evidence requirements, and paired act/abstain evaluation can preserve authorized utility with fewer operator interruptions than uniform approval rules.
Testing. Round 1 reduced deterministic approval interruptions from 12 to 7 with no missed escalation in its designed cases, but those timings were estimated rather than measured with real operators. Security, Game, Runtime, and World now provide stronger act-versus-wait trajectories.
02 / Decision boundary
What keeps this Question alive?
Acting too early can duplicate or commit the wrong Effect; waiting too long can lose a deadline, resource, or strategic option. Static approval-everywhere and model-only escalation both waste scarce attention or miss consequence boundaries.
Run paired act/abstain trajectories with real timing, consequence, expiry, and recovery data across one authority request, one UNKNOWN Effect, and one adversarial policy switch.
A simpler static policy or always-act baseline achieves equal authorized utility, timing, recovery, and operator cost with fewer persistent states.
03 / Supporting publications
Complete arguments connected to this Question.
2 dated publications currently document this research line.
The Smaller Core That Survived Strong Baselines
How Core Work System Round 1 used strong classical baselines and live Codex/Hermes replacement to remove a Task Runtime, reject a generalized Context Kernel, shrink Effect, localize DecisionRequest, and retain provider-neutral Task state.
31 July 2026 ↗Research noteUNKNOWN Is an Operational State, Not a Model Feeling
Why unresolved external reality must be represented as system state rather than inferred from model confidence or collapsed into failure.
31 July 2026 ↗04 / Source discipline
The dossier is an index, not the evidence authority.
Owns the current judgment, next test, and deletion condition.
Own complete dated arguments, limitations, comparisons, and source links.
Own exact code, tests, releases, receipts, and machine evidence.