Autonomy earned by evals
In a Startup with a human founder, each agent earns authority one decision class at a time, from assist to supervised to full.
In a Startup with a human founder, an Agent earns authority one decision class at a time. It climbs from assist to supervised to full on its eval record and drops back automatically when the record slips.
Three levels
| Level | The Agent | The founder |
|---|---|---|
assist | Drafts each Action. | Sends, edits or discards the draft. |
supervised | Acts. Every Action waits a delay window in the founder's pending feed, even a two-way one. | Reads the feed, and may pause, redirect or cancel. |
full | Acts under the class's normal window. | Reads only what they choose. |
A Role holds one level per decision class. The Success Manager can be full on support replies, supervised on refunds and assist on price changes, all at once.
The record that promotes
Grades come from three sources: the Role's offline eval cases, Evaluator verdicts on live Actions, and the founder's corrections. At assist and supervised, every edit, redirect or cancel counts as a failure and becomes a new eval case. The Evals record keeps every grade.
A class moves up one level when the Role passes 95 percent or more of its last 50 graded Actions there. It moves down one level the moment that rate falls below 95 percent. A breach of a Guard or the legal floor drops it straight to assist, and every move is a Decision on the record.
New versions earn their way in
Skills, prompts, Role policies and Mandates are versioned definitions with their own eval suites. A new version must score no worse than the current one offline before it touches a customer. It then runs as an Experiment against the Startup's one Metric, with guardrails.
A version that passes keeps the levels its Role has earned. A version that fails never ships. No Agent edits the Metrics, Evaluators or guardrails that grade it.
Mixing the two paradigms
A zero-human Startup skips the ladder: every class runs at full and relies on delay windows and watchers alone. A Single human Startup mixes the two. Its agents run full where they have earned it, and the founder watches the rest.
Every Startup shares the same Limits, spend states and legal floor. Autonomy changes who watches; it never removes a gate.
In practice
A Services-as-Software bookkeeping firm for dental practices starts its Billing Specialist at assist on refunds. The founder edits 6 of the first 40 drafts, each one a new eval case. Once 48 of its last 50 refunds pass, the class moves to supervised, and five weeks later to full.
In month three, one refund goes to a closed bank account and an Evaluator fails it. The rate dips to 94 percent, so refunds return to supervised that hour. The founder watches 50 more, the rate recovers, and the class climbs back without a meeting.