Conditionals: The Trust Layer

Key Concepts

• Conditional (in agent design): The decision layer that determines what your agent does with a finding. Not just if/else, but a tiered routing system that matches the severity of a finding to the appropriate response.
• Trust account: The cumulative credibility your agent holds with its users. Every relevant alert adds to it; every noisy or low-value notification depletes it. An agent with a zero-balance trust account isn't broken, it's ignored.
• Tiered response: Designing multiple output behaviors for a single agent based on the significance of what it finds, rather than a binary alert/silent toggle.

Quick Reference

Why binary conditionals fail: A simple "if changed, alert" system treats a minor typo the same as a 40% pricing spike. Recipients stop reading within weeks, and critical findings get buried in noise.

The four-tier response model:

1. Silence - finding is within normal range, no action needed
2. Log to digest - finding is real but not urgent (e.g., competitor price change under 10%)
3. Channel summary - finding is notable and timely, relevant to the broader team
4. Direct alert to lead - finding demands immediate attention, full context attached (e.g., 35% pricing spike)

Designing your thresholds:

• Ask: "What would I do if I saw this at 3 a.m.?" - that intuition is the rule you need to write
• Define thresholds based on your domain knowledge, not technical defaults
• Each tier should specify: the trigger condition, the delivery channel, and how much context to include

The conditional is where your expertise enters the system. Everything else - data sources, prompts, API calls - is infrastructure in service of one question: what is worth a human's attention?