The Cost of Letting AI Agents Make Too Many Decisions
AI agents are becoming remarkably good at making decisions. Give one a business objective, connect it to a few APIs, and it can decide which tools to call, what information to retrieve, how to process the results, and what to do next. For developers, this removes much of the conditional logic that traditionally had to be written into applications.
But there is a problem with giving an AI agent too much freedom. Every decision has a cost, and that cost is not always visible in the final output. An agent might complete a task correctly while consuming unnecessary tokens, repeating database queries, triggering redundant API calls, or spending several seconds deciding something that a simple rule could have handled immediately.
The industry spends considerable time discussing what AI agents can do independently. We spend less time asking how many decisions they should actually be allowed to make. That distinction matters...
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