Leaving to run unhindered makes sense when the agents understand both the complete domain context and can be supplied with a strong exit criteria that they understand well.

Otherwise time boxing is both going to help stop entities from wandering off into the weeds. And also communicate expectations from the commissioner about the expected effort levels and output quality requirements.

Empirically in human world, get very different results when an employee, particularly a junior, is asked to spend 1/2 a day on a work package, a week or are left completely to their own devices.

Well, I’ve been having 5.6 sol work on tasks like “find every OTA app on the internet”

I find explicit time bounds are useful for tasks like this, otherwise the LLM will almost certainly return too early.

The proof prompts do say to spend at least 8 hours.

I think like the other commentator noted, I don't do this blindly, as I also wouldn't if I was instructing a junior engineer. I have a rough sense of how long it would take me to research all angles of the task. 5 minutes for a complicated feature is too short for a comprehensive plan. Letting it run for a few hours is also probably unproductive. But 10-60 minutes depending on complexity with followup review is a nice sweet spot. Just my $0.02.