What does it mean that false positive rate?

An agent that fires when it shouldn't wastes your attention and erodes trust.

Example: You build an agent that triggers a 'take a break' reminder every time your heart rate rises above 90 bpm. It fires during your morning run, while you carry groceries upstairs, and when you laugh hard at a joke. Within a week you stop reading the reminders entirely. The agent still fires. You no longer care. When you actually are stress-spiraling at 2 a.m. with a racing heart, you swipe the notification away on reflex. The signal was real. The agent had cried wolf too many times for you to notice.

Try this: Pick one cognitive agent you have running — a reminder, a habit trigger, a journaling prompt, an automated check-in. Over the next seven days, track every time it fires. For each activation, mark it as either 'true positive' (it fired and you genuinely needed the intervention) or 'false positive' (it fired but the trigger condition wasn't actually present, or the response wasn't needed). Calculate your false positive rate: false positives divided by total activations. If the rate exceeds 50%, redesign the trigger condition before the agent becomes background noise.