The viability boundary for agent automation is defined by whether verification is distinguishable from execution: when acceptance criteria are highly uncertain, checking the output costs as much as producing it, so delegation yields no leverage regardless of how fast the agent executes.
It gives engineers a principled stopping rule for agent delegation that does not depend on model quality — some tasks cannot be automated away because the verifier, not the generator, is the load-bearing component.
Any pipeline where the cost of checking correctness approaches the cost of producing the artifact (high-criteria-uncertainty work like design, research, or open-ended judgment) will not benefit from faster generation; effort should shift to making verification cheaper or making criteria crisper.
Verification indistinguishable from execution / MP-style adversarial agents (Medium uncertainty)
Mapping tasks on a 2x2 matrix of uncertainty helps engineers decide where agents are viable versus where verification is indistinguishable from execution.