I Edited the Task Mid-Flight. The Agent Stopped Instead of Guessing.

I spent a while getting permission levels right. What an agent may read, what it may write, what needs a human. That work was worth doing, and it did not save me here. The gap is simple to state and easy to miss: permission levels answer what may this agent do . They say nothing about what happens when the task itself changes after the agent already has permission . The situation When work is handed to an agent, the handoff carries a task definition, a scope, and the conditions that count as done. The agent takes it and starts. Then I edited the task. Not maliciously, not carelessly. I noticed something while the agent was still setting up, and I added a comment that changed what "done" meant. At that moment I had an agent holding valid authority for a task that no longer existed in that form. It had permission. Its permission was correct. Its instructions were stale. Static permission levels do not catch this. The agent is doing exactly what it was allowed to do. The problem is that "what it was allowed to do" was defined against a version of reality that I had just replaced. Why "just ask the human" is the wrong fallback The obvious fix is to have the agent check in when something looks off. I do not think this works, for two reasons. First, the agent cannot see the ambiguity. From inside the handoff, the stale task reads as perfectly coherent. There is no contradiction to notice. The instructions are complete, the scope is clear, and the acceptance conditions are stated. It just happens that a newer version exists elsewhere. Second, if the agent asks me every time it feels uncertain, I have rebuilt the bottleneck I delegated to avoid. Interruptions that fire on vague signals train you to approve them without reading, which is worse than not having them. The check has to be mechanical, and it has to run at a specific moment rather than continuously. The stop condition What I added is small: Bind the task revision at dispatch. The handoff record states which versio