Autonomy and approvals
What an agent does without asking you: three rungs per seat, defaults by decision class, and the short list that always comes to you.
An Agent acts alone inside its seat's bounds and asks above them. Its rung on the ladder sets how much a person sees before an Action runs.
The ladder
Every Role holds one rung per decision class. The same seat can answer routine questions on its own and still draft every refund promise for review.
| Rung | The agent | You |
|---|---|---|
assist | Does the work and stops before it runs | Approve each Action, edit it, or discard it |
supervised | Acts on its own | See only the exceptions in the pending feed |
full | Acts on its own | Read a sample, and anything a watcher flags |
A rung changes who looks, never what is allowed. Limits, delay windows and the legal floor hold at every rung.
Defaults by seat
A seat starts on the rung its kind of work earns. Every Verb has a decision class: low is two-way with nothing at stake, medium is visible or bounded, high is one-way and broad.
| Kind of seat | low | medium | high | Seats |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moves money or signs | supervised | assist | assist | Finance Lead, Billing Specialist, Contracts Manager, Paid Media Manager |
| Most seats | supervised | supervised | assist | Product Lead, Content Lead, Prospector |
| Answers or builds at volume | full | supervised | assist | Customer Lead, Engineering Lead, Analyst |
Each Role page states its own rungs in its contract. A seat in an autonomous Startup, with no human founder, runs every class at full and relies on delay windows and watchers.
How a seat climbs
A class moves up one rung when the seat passes 95 percent of its last 50 graded Actions there. It drops one rung the moment that rate falls, and a breach of a Guard drops it to assist at once.
A Role Review that finds a missed standard also moves the seat down one rung. Grading and the eval record are on Evals.
What always comes to you
The founder holds the Approvals, not the seats. These reach you whatever the rung:
- An Action above a Team lead's Limit, or above the Limit of any seat that answers to you.
- The Verbs in a seat's Approvals, such as launching the Startup and raising a Limit.
- An act the law reserves to a credentialed person, as a Reserved Act.
- Accepting revenue-based financing, which only the owner of record may do.
One thing never asks: a customer's call past an Offer's bound. Each Offer declares atBound (stop, overage or upgrade), so the answer exists before the call arrives.
Bounds at every rung
| Bound | What it decides | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Permission | Which Verbs the seat may call at all | What a seat may call |
| Limit | How much: an amount, a count, a period | Spend and authority |
| Mandate | What it may do without asking, for whom, until when | Spend and authority |
| Delay window | A one-way call waits so any watcher can stop it | Delay windows |
| Approval | Above a Limit, the call waits for the seat it escalates to | Escalation and approvals |
| Stop | Any agent, Team or every customer-facing agent pauses in one call | Pause and replace |
Guides: approve what agents spend, let the support agent refund up to $50, or pause every customer-facing agent.