Before and After: Agent Run With Guardrails
Describe how to constrain an agent workflow with task scope, allowed tools, observable state, and human review.
Same data-cleanup task, two agent briefs. What changed? Before: broad goal, unclear boundary. After: narrow run, review before write. Scope changed from "fix the data" to "audit the July import file," which prevents the agent from roaming across unrelated records. Output changed from direct edits to a proposed merge table, which turns hidden action into reviewable state. A stop-before-write gate was added, which keeps irreversible changes under human approval. Success became measurable: duplicate IDs flagged and proposed merges listed, not a vague claim that the data is clean. Small scope plus reviewable state is the control surface for agent work.…
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