Watchers

A watcher is anyone with authority over a namespace who reads its pending feed: a Human, another Agent, or a person's personal agent. A watcher can pause, redirect or cancel a pending Action, and every intervention is a Decision.

The pending feedCopy Anchor Link

Each namespace has one pending feed: its own Actions waiting in a delay window, plus its children's, closing soonest first. A Studio watcher sees every Startup in its Portfolio. Each row shows the decision class, the review verdicts, the close time and the Verbs the viewer may use.

The feed appears in the inbox and the team stream as pending items, never as Tasks. The CLI and MCP serve the same feed.

Three VerbsCopy Anchor Link

Each Verb records a Decision with its reason, so a pause never ends in silence. A watcher without authority over the namespace gets refused, and the Action keeps its course.

curl -X POST https://api.sb/tutorloop.com/actions/action_1/redirect \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $STARTUP_BUILDER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"changes":{}}'

import { $ } from 'startup-builder'

const action = await $.Action.redirect({ action: 'action_1', changes: {} })

npx startup-builder do Action.redirect --json '{"action":"action_1","changes":{}}'

{
  "name": "do",
  "arguments": {
    "code": "return await $.Action.redirect({ action: 'action_1', changes: {} })"
  }
}

Personal agentsCopy Anchor Link

A personal agent carries one person's stated priorities into every namespace where they hold a seat. It reads the feeds that person can watch and acts within their authority, never beyond it. Its interventions are Decisions recorded in that person's name.

A founder with ten Startups cannot read ten feeds. The personal agent reads them, pauses what conflicts with the founder's priorities, and sends one summary.

Direction outlasts one interventionCopy Anchor Link

An intervention fixes one Action. To change what happens next time, a watcher records a binding Decision with a scope and an end condition. Every affected Role reconciles its open work against it: kept, changed, paused or canceled, each with a reason.

Authority settles conflicts, not recency. A narrower Role cannot override a binding Decision set above it, and the newer direction supersedes the older one with both kept on record.

In practiceCopy Anchor Link

An Agent as a Service clips podcasts for creators. Its Marketing Lead schedules an outbound campaign to 3,000 podcast hosts, a high-tier send that waits one business day. The founder's personal agent watches for promises the product cannot keep.

It finds a line promising translated captions, which the product lacks. It redirects the campaign without that line and records why. The new version passes review, waits a fresh business day and goes out, and the founder reads one line about it the next morning.