Why our agents wait for a yes

Drafting is cheap. Sending is not.

Most of the value of an agent is in the preparation: reading the thread, finding the agreed date, writing the email. Most of the risk is in one moment, when the email leaves. A wrong draft costs a minute. A wrong email to a client costs a lot more, and cannot be taken back.

So AgOS splits the two. Agents do the preparation on their own. Sending an email, booking something or calling an outside tool can wait in Approvals, where a person sees exactly what will happen and why, and says yes or no.

The model is never the authorization

There is a rule in the AgOS code that is easy to state and easy to break: what an agent is allowed to do, and what has to wait for a person, is decided by ordinary, deterministic code. A model can flag that an action looks wrong and hold it back. It is structurally unable to answer "is this allowed?".

That matters because models are persuadable. A document, an email or a web page can contain text that looks like an instruction. If a model decided what was permitted, that text could talk it into something. Here, the most a model can do is make AgOS more careful.

One path for every privileged change

Approvals are not only for agents. When AgOS itself needs to make a privileged change, such as giving a new hire access to a space, it stages that change as an approval too. There is one queue, one way to approve, stop or retry, and one record, instead of a separate mechanism for every feature.

It also means the record is complete. Every decision is kept with who made it and when, so "who gave them access?" has an answer.

Private by default

A queue of pending actions is sensitive: it holds recipients, subjects and the reasons behind them. So Approvals are not public inside the company. People see the requests they made, and only someone allowed to decide a request is offered Approve.

What this costs

Waiting for a person is slower than not waiting. We think that is the right trade for anything that leaves the building, and the wrong one for everything else, which is why research, drafting and answering do not wait at all.

If you want to see it, create an account, ask an agent for an email, and look at the card before you press Approve.