The Saturation Trap and the Subjectivity of Intervention Timing: Why Affect-Based Triggers and LLM Judges Fail to Time Interventions on Autonomous Agents

Abstract

As autonomous AI agents move from conversational systems to long-horizon software execution, runtime safety layers that decide when to interrupt an agent have become essential. We study this timing problem using a continuous 18-dimensional affective-dynamics engine (HEART) as a diagnostic probe, evaluating four intervention trigger families - absolute state thresholds, composite state-action patterns, regex reasoning-feature extraction, and zero-shot LLM-as-judge - against human-annotated intervention points on SWE-bench-Verified debugging traces. We report three findings. First, a State Saturation Trap: modeled frustration quickly crosses the threshold and stays at its maximum (v2 erratum: the observer could not register recovery; decay never ran), converting threshold-on-state triggers from moment detectors into near-constant indicators that fire on 39-83% of actions across five trajectories. Second, a capability-and-context floor for LLM judges: a small model(gpt-5.4-mini) never fires, while frontier and cross-vendor models escape the zero-firing floor only with full-trajectory context, reaching only F1 0.17-0.40 at up to 90x the cost. Third, and most importantly, the supervised target is not reproducible among humans: three trained annotators using the same rubric on a 56-action trajectory agree on where to intervene only slightly above chance (location Krippendorff's alpha = +0.047; best pairwise Cohen's kappa = +0.349) and not at all on intervention type (pause degenerate; clarify below chance; reflect only alpha = +0.226). We conclude that intervention timing is a low-reliability construct, making single-annotator F1 an unsuitable optimization target. Our contribution is the joint mapping of this problem across human inter-rater reliability, four detector architectures, a cross-model LLM-judge sweep, and a reproduced saturation effect, rather than any single detector's accuracy.