# Trust makes agents fast

> Checks and reviews are brakes: they never go away, however many times an agent passes them. Trust is the accelerator. An agent that earns a track record on a kind of work can be checked less on that work, and it ends up both faster and safer.

- Published: 2026-10-23
- Author: Jake Spillane, Hivemind Labs
- Full article: https://hivemind.au/insights/trust-makes-agents-fast

## Key findings

- Across 6,000 generated tasks, agents relying on checks alone let through three times as many serious mistakes as agents that also had to earn trust.
- Twenty good actions in a row can still hide an agent getting about 1 in 6 wrong. To show it is at least 1-in-20 good takes 73 in a row.
- The business sets its appetite for risk per task; the agent speeds up only when its record proves it.