"Agentic" gets used to describe everything from a chatbot with a few tool calls to a fully autonomous pipeline that runs unattended for hours. In practice, the useful definition is narrower: an agent is a system that decides its own next step, not just its own next word.
That distinction matters because it changes what can go wrong. A text generator that says something wrong is embarrassing. An agent that takes the wrong action — deletes a file, sends an email, charges a card — is a different category of failure, and it needs a different category of safeguard.
In our own builds, the pattern that has worked is treating every agent action as a proposed diff, not an executed command, until a human or a hard-coded rule confirms it. It slows down the flashy autonomous-demo version of the product, but it is the version that survives contact with a real business.
We will keep writing about the specific guardrails as we build more of Romeo in the open — starting with the permissions model in our next post.