Your agent does something wrong. How far does it reach before anyone notices?

Two months ago I asked here how people stay aware of what their agents are doing, and @getosmo replied with something that has been quietly rearranging my roadmap since.

I had been treating "can you undo it" as the line for when an agent should stop and ask. He took that apart. Irreversibility over-fires and under-fires, he said. It over-fires on things that cannot be undone but that nobody cares about, like the agent writing a log line. It under-fires on the ones that really hurt: a mass email to 50k users, or a migration you can only roll back after downtime. "Reversible on paper, ruinous in practice."

His version is that the gate should key on reach, not on reversibility. Not "is this safe" but "how far does this reach if I'm wrong." And the part that stuck with me: the agent is the worst possible judge of its own blast radius, because it does not know there are 50k people on that list.

@tina_chhabra had pushed the same way earlier in that thread, that this gets worse the moment the agent stops writing code and starts booking meetings or sending email, where you find out after the fact. I have been sitting with both of those for two months, and they leave me with a question I still cannot answer cleanly for our own product:

If your agent gets one thing wrong today, what is the largest number of people who find out before you do?

For a coding agent that is usually one. You, reading a diff. The moment the agent sends, books, charges, replies to a customer or touches production, that number stops being one, and most of us have never actually worked out what it is. So whether you run agents or ship them to other people, which of these are you?

A. Nothing my agent does reaches past me. Genuinely low stakes, no gate needed.

B. It could reach customers, I know it, and I have not built the gate yet.

C. It stops and waits for someone to come back and look. Safe, and it quietly kills completion.

D. It emails or Slacks someone, which mostly works until the person who cares is not in that channel.

E. I built the real thing, timeouts, escalation, an audit trail, and it ate a quarter I had not planned for.

Ours, honestly: we sat on B longer than is comfortable, moved to D, and then found that delivering the question is the small part. What surrounds it is the work. Whether a timeout should mean deny or hand back to the terminal took us longer to settle than building the delivery did. So did reaching the one person who can answer

when they are not sitting in front of your product, and being able to prove afterwards who approved what.

The two I still cannot answer, and I do not think anyone has:

How do you reach the person who has to decide, when they are not looking at your product and never installed anything of yours?

And what does your system do when they simply never answer? Every answer I have heard to that one is a guess, and the guess is usually "keep waiting", which is how a job sits stalled for six hours and a customer decides your product is broken.

[Same disclosure as last time: I build Pushary, which is the ask-a-human part of this, and these days we sell it to other companies to embed as much as to people running agents in their own terminal. Obvious bias, asking anyway. The last thread taught me more about this than six months of building did.]

Which letter are you, and what did it cost you to find out? I will come back in a few weeks and post the spread.