Part 1 · Understand
Why you approve everything
Approval and guardrails are permanent, and the reasons are not about trust.
01What it is
Nothing reaches a person without a recorded approval from you. Autonomy stages widen what the system does on its own, and none of them remove the approval on a message to a named human.
02Why it exists
Two reasons, and neither is that the writing is unreliable.
Sending has a blast radius you cannot recall. A bad message to a real buyer costs that relationship, and a hundred of them cost your domain. Mailbox reputation takes months to build and a week to lose, so the limits are enforced before the send rather than reported after it.
The second reason is that your judgement is the input the system learns from. Every rejection teaches it something a passing grade cannot. A product that sends without you gets no correction signal and drifts toward whatever the model finds easy.
The approval is a database row, not a screen state. Deleting it drops the content back to unapproved, and the database refuses to publish anything without one.
03How to use it
- 01Work the Approvals screen with the keyboard. j and k to move, a to approve, e to edit, x to reject.
- 02Reject with a reason when the draft misses. The revision loop reads it.
- 03Raise your autonomy stage when you stop editing drafts, not before.
- 04Use the global pause when something looks wrong. It takes effect at every stage immediately.
04What good looks like
- You give it
- A founder rejects four of the first ten drafts with specific reasons.
- You get
- The revision loop rewrites against those violations and the next batch needs one edit instead of four.
- Why
- A rejection with a reason is a specific correction. The loop rewrites against violations rather than starting again.
Derived from the rules in the code
05What weak looks like, and what it costs
- You give it
- A founder approves everything without reading, to clear the queue.
- You get
- Output quality stays where the model left it, and the learning screen fills with outcomes nobody can attribute to a decision.
- Why
- Approving without reading removes the only correction signal the system has.
Derived from the rules in the code