Why Supervised Agents, Not Autonomous Ones

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0200

Last year, a client asked me to set up an automated technical watch. The need looked simple: monitor about thirty RSS feeds, filter the noise, group articles by theme, summarize the relevant ones, send a mail every morning. The kind of task you gladly hand to an intern, except there was no intern.

I started by looking at what existed. The SaaS watch tools did the job, but badly: rigid filters, no classification by business theme, generic summaries. Homegrown scripts piled up fast, and nobody knew what was running or why it failed yesterday. And then there were the autonomous agents, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, and the whole wave that promises to delegate work to an LLM that decides, acts, learns. I looked, I read the security incidents documented at Cisco, and I saw an agent that, in theory, could send a mail to a client without anyone validating it, simply because the LLM had judged it was the right action.

LLM on Mathias WOLFF

Why Supervised Agents, Not Autonomous Ones