Gorman: the autonomy horizon is set by detection latency, not error rate

Gorman's model has two terms, not one. Errors compound: "Take a wrong turn at step N, and step N+1, N+2, N+3 could well build on that mistake." Verification is the correction: "Mistakes aren't a problem if they're caught before they compound." That gives him two terms, "the probability of an error, and the probable number of subsequent steps before the error's detected." Stated bluntly by him: "if the agent f***ed up, how soon would we/it know?"

He is not optimistic about what better testing buys. Full autonomy of the kind "Anthropic and others claim will soon be upon us" needs assurance beyond safety-critical practice, and even reaching that bar "might extend the agentic horizon from, say, N steps to 1.1 N steps before we need to course correct." The post carries no measurements. It is an argument, from a practitioner who has spent decades on test assurance, and it is offered as one.

Why it matters: Most harness work optimises the probability term. Gorman's point is that the other term, how many steps run before a mistake surfaces, is the one you can actually shorten, and almost nobody instruments it. If you are extending an unattended loop, the question to answer first is not how good the model is. It is how many steps your loop can run wrong before something fails loudly.