Definition
Plain language
A statistical approach to deciding, step by step, whether you have enough evidence yet or should keep gathering more.
As stated in the literature
Abraham Wald's framework for making accept/reject decisions on streaming data with a stopping rule rather than a fixed sample size; the conceptual ancestor of belief-threshold control over when a coding agent should pay for verification.
Why it matters: It saves time and cost by letting you stop collecting evidence the moment you've seen enough to decide, instead of committing to a fixed sample upfront.
For example, a quality inspector can test products one at a time and stop as soon as the results clearly show the batch is good or bad, rather than always testing a fixed number.
Heard on the show
“… technical term tap-to-define, with links to the related papers grouped by theme, from Wald's old sequential analysis up through the modern agent work. …”Episode 170 — When a One-Liner Beats Your Agent's Clever Verification Logic