Our operating model, in autonomy levels
Agent operations · Earned autonomy
What you will leave with
Classify tasks, write ownership contracts, and run safe parallel work without fleet cosplay.
What you will build
A manager lane for decisions and worker lanes for bounded execution.
- 01ClassifyScore risk, agency, and orchestration separately.
- 02DecomposeFind slices with disjoint files and outcomes.
- 03ContractEncode ownership, exclusions, proof, and stop conditions.
- 04DispatchGive every lane isolated state and minimum authority.
- 05AggregateReview evidence packets and reconcile shared work once.
Build it in sequence
Audit actual tasks, not platform aspirations
List what agents do today and place each task on the lowest level that describes its real behaviour. Multiple agents that a person sequences manually are not managed-by-exception.
Answer the three defensibility questions
For every task above supervised delegation, name detection time, rollback, and evidence. Missing answers cap the task's autonomy until a control closes the gap.
task: post-deploy-canary
agency: goal-driven
orchestration: parallel-lane
detect_wrong: required assertions against staging
rollback: revert one pull request
proves_right: evidence packet bound to commit and deployment
human_decides: visual taste and production promotionDecompose for structural independence
Choose lanes with disjoint files, state, and acceptance criteria. Keep shared files with the manager or queue dependent work; do not solve a bad decomposition with retries.
Write the lane contract before dispatch
State owned paths, forbidden paths, required evidence, allowed tools, and stop-and-report conditions. A lane that discovers cross-boundary work must escalate, not silently widen scope.
Aggregate evidence, not transcripts
Require commit, checks, artifact, observations, and recommendation. The manager reconciles dependencies and shared changes after lanes finish rather than refereeing live edits.
Definition of done
- Agency and orchestration are scored separately.
- Every parallel lane owns disjoint files and state.
- Cross-boundary work stops and reports.
- Evidence identifies the exact commit and artifact.
- Rollback and human decisions are explicit.
What breaks and what it means
Workers collide after other lanes merge.
Ownership or dependency boundaries were not genuinely disjoint; redesign the slices.
The manager becomes a log router.
Replace transcripts with compact evidence packets and decision requests.
Questions, corrections, and useful disagreement
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