Rule
Escalate through a clear supervision tree.
What AgentOps Enforces
- Give every worker one supervisor.
- Define stuck thresholds before work begins.
- Let supervisors reframe, reassign, stop, or escalate.
- On repeated failure, hand the failure context to a fresh agent — don't loop the stuck, saturated one.
- Keep humans at the top of the tree instead of inside every retry loop.
Failure Signal
- Agents ask peers for decisions no peer owns.
- Work bounces sideways until nobody knows who is responsible.
- Humans are pulled into routine retries.
- A worker decides project-wide policy from a narrow context window.
Done Looks Like
When a worker gets stuck, there is one obvious path upward and one owner of the decision.