At what point should an AI agent stop being autonomous?

I've been thinking about this while building with coding agents lately. Giving an agent permission to write code, run tests, commit changes and open PRs feels pretty reasonable. But then you start adding more agents. One agent can spawn another. That agent gets tools. Those tools can modify the repo. Another agent reviews the work. Eventually you have a chain of actions where it's not obvious anymore who was actually authorized to do what. The interesting part to me isn't really "can agents code autonomously?" It's: How do you keep autonomy from turning into authority? A few things I'm curious about: Should a child agent inherit any permissions from its parent? Should every agent have its own identity? How do you trace which agent actually made a change? Where should human approval become mandatory? Is GitHub branch protection enough, or is there a layer missing above it? How much authorization overhead is worth adding before it starts slowing agents down? I've been experimenting with this problem in my own work, and the more agents I use, the less I think the hard problem is generating code. It's keeping the boundaries around that code intact. How are you handling this today?