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MC Mike Chambers On The New Stack Podcast

“You don't want the agent to be marking its own homework. You don't want the agent to be deciding, yeah, the thing I decided to do, I definitely think I should do.”

The New Stack Podcast · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“You don't want the agent to be marking its own homework. You don't want the agent to be deciding, yeah, the thing I decided to do, I definitely think I should do.” — Mike Chambers, The New Stack Podcast

Context

Asked what rules should apply when an agent can spend money, Chambers says the guardrails should sit outside the agent's own loop. He sees cheap decision models as a way to afford more of those checks.

Transcript

The New Stack Podcast Around 22:45 into the episode
Mike Chambers

well, yeah, maybe either

Nick Lucchesi

or, I suppose. I

Mike Chambers

…an agent and persuade it to send me some money, that would be great. But yeah, I guess, yeah, there's a place for a decider model in something like that. So, one of the things that you want to do when you're doing and implementing these guardrails is you want to have a system which is able, or it's a good idea to have a system which is out of loop of the agent that you're currently running. So, you don't want the agent to be marking its own homework. You don't want the agent to be deciding, yeah, the thing I decided to do, I definitely think I should do. And so, having something which is running somewhere else. So, this is where we have like LLM as a judge and all that kind of stuff comes into play. Those kinds of terms are used for different things, but this could be used there too. And so, a decider model might mean that we can have some decisions made around those kinds of processes maybe more frequently than we could before, because it's in…

Nick Lucchesi

important. This is not on my list of questions, but I want to ask. Like, how far away are we knowing what you mean? You've been covering, you know, in AI since it was called machine learning, right? So, or popularly called that. How far away are we from agents regularly spending, let's say…

Mike Chambers

Look, I guess there are a couple of different ends of the spectrum as was sort of intimated here. So, like, I am, I'm personally like interested and have played around with X402 and those types of things, where I think it's a super fascinating protocol full stop, but also as a protocol to basically…

Nick Lucchesi

I can see us going there. Yeah, it sounds like your risk tolerance is the same. Of course, yeah. I wonder where we'll be in a fear. I wanted to ask just kind of a general one. You switch gears a little bit. Strans Decider is open source. Yes. Yes. So developers can inspect, they can adapt it.…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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