What is an Autonomous Execution?

Planning and execution are distinct capabilities: an agent can produce a sound plan and still fail at autonomous execution if it can't recover from unexpected states along the way. True autonomous execution means the agent monitors its own progress, detects when a step didn't produce the expected outcome, and adjusts — retrying, choosing an alternate path, or escalating — rather than blindly continuing a script that has silently gone off track. The practical value of autonomous execution is that a multi-step task which would otherwise require a human to babysit each step (check the result, decide the next action, repeat) instead runs end to end, with the human only involved at defined checkpoints. This is what turns “the agent could theoretically do this” into “the agent actually did this while I was doing something else.”