What Does Done Even Mean? Agents and Paperclip's Liveness Model - Dotta, Paperclip

A short, dense talk on a failure mode every agent builder hits: agents produce more work than anyone can review, and 'done' quietly becomes a lie the system tells itself. Dotta reframes completion as a set of assertions — artifact produced, evidence attached, verifier separate from author, named owner, defined next step — and shows how Paperclip's liveness model keeps work flowing without drowning humans in review queues. Ends with a checklist you can apply to your own agent pipeline regardless of harness.

• 'Done' isn't a boolean; it's a ladder — producer claims it, a reviewer checks it, it's validated against standards, an authorized person approves it, and it survives real-world conditions.
• The core trade-off: too much autonomy produces slop, too much review produces unprocessable queues. Design for liveness with explicit blockers, not blanket approvals.
• Separate the verifier from the author — ideally with a different model — and demand explicit evidence of completion rather than the agent's self-report.
• Give agents their own verification tools (browsers, screenshots, custom hooks) so they test their work before a human ever sees it.

Part of Issue Nº 001: LLMs for judgment, code for counting: scaling to 500K sensors on 300x fewer tokens