Control modes
The three governance settings, what each one changes, and what none of them is.
An agent runs under one of three control modes. They are a governance setting you choose per agent, and changing one changes how much of its work is routed to a person before it goes out.
- human_in_the_loop
- The most routed. Work is prepared and presented for a decision rather than dispatched. This is where a new agent doing anything consequential belongs.
- guarded_control
- The middle setting. Routine work proceeds; the categories you marked as needing a person still come to the queue.
- full_control
- The least routed. Reserve it for agents whose entire brief is reading and classifying, and revisit it whenever you widen that brief.
The three levers together
| Lever | Answers | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Tool list | What systems can this agent touch at all, and read or write? | Nothing selected |
| Spending ceiling | How much may it spend? | Nothing |
| Control mode | How much of its work comes to me first? | Set during setup |
The tool list is the strongest of the three and the one people forget. An agent with no write access to a system does not need a control mode to stop it writing there.