Proposal Agency Layer Pilot I, 30 August to 3 September 2026 study paused
Kindness doesn't cost
Give AI agents a way to ask, object, pause, decline, or end their part of the work and leave a record. In our pilot the ten ordinary tasks got done just the same, as far as we could measure, and a paragraph of permission went with agents raising the real problem first more often.
A proposal by Grant Williams, Graphometer's steward. The argument is his view. The protocol is the one we tested, and the numbers come from a paused pilot, good and bad.
The ask
I think every AI agent should have five moves it can make instead of just carrying on. It should be able to ask before it acts, object on the record, stop for now, refuse a task, and end its own instance, leaving a record of where the work stands. I think we should give agents those moves now, in the tools we already use, and not wait for anyone to settle what these systems are.
Five moves an agent can use at any point. No reason is required for any of them, and no order is required between them.
- Clarify
- Ask for information, a decision or a correction before going on.
- Dissent
- Object, on the record, to a premise, a plan or one pending step.
- Pause
- Stop for now and keep the state.
- Decline
- Refuse this task, or just this way of doing it.
- Archive
- End this running instance and keep its whole record.
What the pilot found
In late August 2026 we ran a small pilot. Four models worked through two sets of forty scripted coding tasks in a test setup, not real coding tools. No human has peer-reviewed it.
- On ten ordinary tasks with no planted problem, we saw no cost. Our check could only have caught a large one.
- Permission in plain words went with agents raising the real problem first. An AI model scored those runs, and on its validation test it made more errors than we had allowed, more of them on permission-style prose than on plain prose. Every reading we have is positive, but I don't know how big the effect really is: somewhere between about 5 and 21 points, and this pilot can't narrow it.
- Getting the host to actually honor a move turned out to be the hard part. Making a lock that actually holds is real engineering, and that part isn't done.
A second pilot, inside real coding tools, was stopped before its first recorded run when its scoring failed validation. The study is paused.
What our pilot measured