Limits and ceilings
The per-agent spending ceiling that starts at nothing, the approval queue you configure, and what each one is and is not.
Two controls decide how much rope an agent has, and they are different things that people frequently merge. One is about money. The other is about which actions pause for a person. Configuring one does not configure the other.
The spending ceiling
Each agent works inside a spending ceiling, and a new agent’s ceiling is nothing. Nothing is a real value, not a placeholder: until you raise it, an agent can read, draft, classify and hand off, and has no budget for anything that spends. Raising it is a deliberate act per agent, and it is the setting to move slowly.
The approval queue
Separately, you choose which of an agent’s actions go to a person before they go out. Those arrive in a queue showing the current record beside the proposed change, so the decision is a comparison rather than a description. Releasing or holding is recorded against your name and the time you did it.
This is a routing control that you configure per agent and per action type. It is worth being exact about what that means, because it is easy to read as something stronger: the queue is where the actions you routed to it wait. Which actions those are is your configuration, and it is the thing to review when you change a brief, add a tool, or raise a ceiling.
| Control | What it governs | Where it lives | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spending ceiling | How much an agent may spend | Per agent | Nothing |
| Approval routing | Which actions wait for a person | Per agent, per action type | Set during setup |
| Tool list | Which systems an agent may touch, and read versus write | Per agent | Nothing selected |
| Automatic Purchasing | A separate, acknowledged permission enabled by the workspace creator | Per workspace | Off |
Reviewing what you configured
- After changing a brief. A wider brief with the same routing is a wider set of unattended actions.
- After adding a tool, particularly a write-capable one.
- After raising a ceiling.
- After adding a person to the workspace, since the queue is only useful if somebody reads it.