AOS does an enormous amount of work autonomously, but a small set of decisions should only ever be made by the founder. Those are the five approval points. When a mission hits one, it pauses that thread, writes a recommendation with the rationale and the alternatives, and waits for you to click yes or no. These are the only places customer data, secrets, and production access are allowed to cross.
The five approval points
- Money over a cap. Any spend, refund, discount, or commitment over a number you set. The defaults are $1,000 per move and $10,000 per week, both adjustable at install.
- Public claims. Anything that goes out under the company name claiming a fact: press, website, decks, paid copy, or customer email blasts above 500 recipients.
- Customer data leaving the boundary. Any move that puts identifiable customer information outside the workspace: a vendor integration, an export, a third-party share, or an AI training opt-in.
- Production-touching changes. Code deploys, infrastructure changes, billing rules, and security policy. AOS drafts and reviews every one; you flip the switch.
- Audit-trail edits. Deleting evidence or editing a logged decision after the fact. Rare, and the most important when it fires.
What you see when one fires
An approval point lights up in your queue with three things: the recommendation, the rationale behind it, and the alternatives. You decide, and the mission continues with that branch confirmed. Your decision and its reason are written into the evidence trail, and the next mission that touches the same area inherits the context.
Adjusting your thresholds
The money caps are set at install and can be changed at any time. If you find a particular approval point fires too often or not enough for your comfort, tune it. The goal is for approvals to capture exactly the decisions you want to keep and nothing else.
How approvals relate to autonomy
Everything outside the five approval points proceeds without you. The practical limit on how many missions you can run in parallel is your own attention span for these approvals; most founders comfortably handle three to five concurrent missions.