The useful question for agents is not whether they can reason more. It is whether they can decide when additional reasoning is justified. Always-on deliberation creates cost and latency; under-thinking creates brittle automation. Production systems need a policy for spending cognition.
That policy has at least three parts. First, uncertainty should be observable: missing evidence, conflicting retrieved passages, high-impact actions, or unusual tool arguments should trigger extra scrutiny. Second, tool access should be bounded by permissions, schemas, and business context. Third, evaluation should measure the agent as a control system, not as a chat transcript.
This is where many agent demos will fail. They show an impressive path through one task, but they do not define the budget, the veto points, or the conditions for abstention. Reliable agents will feel less magical and more like well-governed decision systems.