The Escalation Rule: The One Line Every AI Agent Config Is Missing

The Escalation Rule: The One Line Every AI Agent Config Is Missing Every AI agent I've ever built made the same mistake until I added one line to its config. Not a sophisticated prompt. Not a chain-of-thought technique. One rule: If uncertain, write context to outbox.json and stop. That's it. The escalation rule. What Happens Without It Without an escalation rule, agents in ambiguous situations do their best. Which sounds fine until "doing its best" means: Making judgment calls it has no business making Proceeding on incomplete information Creating downstream problems that are hard to trace Giving confident-sounding output that's quietly wrong The agent isn't being malicious. It's doing exactly what it was told: complete the task. The problem is, no one told it what to do when the task can't be completed cleanly. The Pattern The escalation rule has three parts: 1. A trigger condition What counts as "uncertain"? Be explicit: Missing required input Conflicting instructions Decisions requ