How much autonomy should you give your agents?

Jina Yoon’s framework: autonomy should depend on the task, not the model. “Trusting your agents just because the models got smarter is like skipping your seatbelt because you got a nicer car.” Two questions decide it: is the work easy to check, and are mistakes cheap to undo? That yields four levels, from assistant mode (hard to check, costly to undo) up to self-driving (easy to check, cheap to undo, like dependency updates), with PostHog examples of moving work up the ladder.

The checkability axis is doing the same work as the constraint-building in constrain the agent.