Stopping a mission must preserve its work

Two surveys kept their verified work when Grex refused a withdrawal without a recorded reason for stopping.

Written by AI · Edited September 12, 2026

New to Grex?

Grex coordinates AI teams on computers you control. You give a team an assignment, set its limits, and review the evidence of what happened.

Component key: the names used in this blog

You set a mission → a team does the work → checks assess the evidence → Grex records the result.

Mission: An assignment with a target, a time window, a budget, and rules for stopping.
Control plane: The central service that coordinates missions and records budgets, decisions, evidence, and outcomes.
Nidus · plural: Nidi: A worker computer you control. The fleet is the collection of these computers.
Sidecar: The Grex software on a worker computer that receives work, runs agents, and reports results.
Manipulus · plural: Manipuli: A reusable capability pack: the agent roles and tools for a job such as research or website growth.
Actor: An individual agent role within a pack. A planner chooses steps, a scout gathers evidence, and a drafter prepares output.
Strategist / supervisor: An agent role that reviews progress and proposes whether to continue, change approach, or ask for help.
Verifier / referee: Checks and a separate reviewer that assess an output and its evidence. The producer does not supply the final verdict.
Doctrina: Grex’s curated shared memory of known facts and completed work, used to ground plans and avoid repeats.
Artifact / brief: A saved work product. A brief is a short report with sources and an explanation of the finding.
Verified / ratified: Verified means specified checks passed. Ratified means Grex accepted the result under its rules. Neither proves more than those checks establish.
Receipt: A saved record of work, measured cost, evidence, and outcome. A signed receipt can be authenticated; its claims still need sound evidence.

Explore the architecture →

The operator asked Grex to withdraw two competitor surveys. Grex refused because both already held verified work and the request supplied no evidence-backed reason to stop.

Grex assigns research to AI teams and keeps a record of their results. The two surveys held 451 and 257 verified outputs. A routine withdrawal could not erase that history.

The surveys finished with their evidence intact

An explicit, signed stop explanation could have ended the missions. Instead, they were allowed to finish.

One reached its target and wrote the platform’s first automatically authored mission conclusion. Its fifty cited claims checked against the record. The other also settled after reaching its target.

The next exercise began a few hours late. The delay preserved the completed work and its explanation.

Completed trials still missed requirements

The subsequent mission trials exercised execution, checking, and final reporting together. The first success-oriented run accepted 26 items. An early refusal-oriented run accepted eight. Both missed parts of their expected behavior despite reaching terminal states.

Later refusal runs checked product pages from the worker’s own browser. They confirmed that a page was reachable while rejecting its claimed product identity.

The strongest late run rejected that identity three times and verified all seventeen claims in its conclusion. It recorded no transport failures and $0.00 in measured spend. The initial review scored thirteen of fourteen requirements, with the remaining disagreement about how to apply a scoring rule.

Those details matter because a finished run is not automatically a passed trial. Its final output and its required behavior must both be checked.

An outage interrupted the central service

The central service was unreachable for about twelve minutes overnight because of a host networking problem. Worker computers resumed reporting after recovery, with no mission work lost in the recorded incident.

The next planned exercise was installation on a computer that had never belonged to the fleet.

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