See It Work — Start loose, tighten progressively — every adjustment documented | Book 06 · AI Agents for Compliance & Audit

A common compliance-agent failure is over-tuning at the start — strict, brittle thresholds that bury the team in false positives until they ignore the alerts. The discipline instead: start loose, tighten progressively, and treat every threshold adjustment as a documented compliance decision, not a guess. That documentation is the SOURCE/TRUTH/INTEGRITY trail proving how the system was calibrated.

Alert fatigue from brittle thresholds is how a compliance system quietly stops working — people tune it out. Calibrating progressively, with every change documented, keeps the alerts meaningful and the tuning defensible.

What this means for you

Calibrate thresholds loose-to-tight and document every change — avoiding the alert-fatigue failure. What this means for you: your compliance agent stays effective instead of getting tuned out — you start loose and tighten as you learn, and because every threshold change is documented, your calibration is a defensible trail of decisions rather than a pile of guesses.

Progressive calibration, every change documented:

When Agents Fail

the failurebrittle thresholds, alert fatigue

the waystart loose, tighten over time

every adjustmentdocumented

each changea decision, not a guess

Start loose, tighten progressively — every threshold adjustment is a documented compliance decision, not a guess.

For the technical reader — the command, and how to verify it yourself

# one line · you do not need to run this
see walkthrough

see walkthrough
# -> thresholds calibrated progressively, every change documented

Full step-by-step is in Appendix RX: Hands-On Demonstrations in the book.