Lesson 4: Agent autonomy requires explicit constraints

Unrestricted autonomy is a liability. Left unbounded, agents tend toward excessive tool invocation, redundant reasoning loops, and misaligned objectives. The fix is to balance autonomy with explicit limits: bounded planning horizons (a cap on how many steps), predefined tool access policies (what the agent is allowed to call), and explicit stopping criteria (how it knows it is done). Constrained autonomy produces more reliable outcomes, especially in production. This is the same problem Anthropic solved in its research system with effort scaling rules, and the same instinct behind keeping toolsets small in the context-engineering topic.