alt Hacker Newsy'see, I would not define a system as "highly autonomous" if it only responds to requests.
And I get that there are workarounds; effectively a cron job every second prompting "do the next thing".
But in my personal definition of "highly autonomous" it would not need prompting at all. It would be thinking all the time, independently of requests.
The model is not the system. The model is a component of the system. The "cron job" (or other means by which a continuous action loop is implemented) and the necessary prompting for it to gather input (including subsequent user input or other external data) and to pursue a set of objectives which evolves based on input are all also parts of the system.