# Autonomy in depth

URL: /agents/autonomy-levels · Id: `page:agents/autonomy-levels`

> How a Startup runs itself, deciding, acting within its authority, and learning, while humans steer it without scheduling it.

An autonomous [Startup](/business/nouns/startup) decides what to do next, acts within enforced authority, and learns from each result, with no human choosing its [Tasks](/business/nouns/task). These chapters explain the loop, its owners, its limits, and how humans steer it.

- [The operating loop](/agents/autonomy-levels/operating-loop): Every Startup and the Studio run one loop, wake, decide, act, review, with no human choosing the next Task.
- [Autonomy earned by evals](/agents/autonomy-levels/evals): In a Startup with a human founder, each agent earns authority one decision class at a time, from assist to supervised to full.
- [Decision classes](/agents/autonomy-levels/decision-classes): A decision class sorts every Verb by whether its effect can be undone and what is at stake, and the class sets how long an Action waits.
- [Delay windows](/agents/autonomy-levels/delay-windows): A delay window is the time a reviewed one-way Action waits before it runs, so someone can step in; if nobody does, it proceeds.
- [Watchers](/agents/autonomy-levels/watchers): A watcher reads a namespace's pending feed and can pause, redirect or cancel any pending Action; every intervention is a Decision.
- [Brakes](/agents/autonomy-levels/brakes): A brake stops one class of effects, such as sends, spend, publishes or price changes, across many Startups at once, until it expires or is lifted.
- [Oversight](/agents/autonomy-levels/oversight): Oversight is the human review a piece of work requires, declared by what the work is, never by what an agent can do.
- [Guarantees](/agents/autonomy-levels/guarantees): What holds for every Startup at every autonomy level, under every operating model, enforced by the platform rather than by agent instructions.
- [Recovery and proof](/agents/autonomy-levels/recovery-and-proof): How a Startup survives failed calls, restarts and bad Decisions, how reverts contain damage, and how the record proves the loop works.