Everyone is building AI agents. Who’s designing the stop button?

AI agents introduce unpredictable behavior into products traditionally designed around explicit rules and known transitions, making it essential to distinguish where autonomy is useful from where reliability is mandatory. Products can let AI interpret intentions and construct workflows while using deterministic execution, visible uncertainty, confirmation steps, and clear recovery mechanisms to protect consequential actions. Designing effective agent experiences increasingly means defining boundaries around what AI may decide, when humans must intervene, and how users can understand, correct, or stop an autonomous process.