Troubleshooting

Why is my mission stuck?

Most of the time a mission that looks "stuck" is actually waiting on you. Here is how to diagnose and unblock the common cases. 1. It is waiting at an approval point The most common reason a mission pauses is that it hit one of the five approval points: money over a cap, a public claim, customer data leaving the boundary, a production-touching change, or an audit-trail edit. Check your approval queue. Each pending approval shows the recommendation, the rationale, and the alternatives. Click yes or no and the mission resumes on that branch. 2. It is waiting on a clarifying answer At the start of a mission the CEO agent asks up to two clarifying questions, and nothing executes until the brief is confirmed. If a mission has not started, open it and check whether it is waiting for you to answer a question or confirm the brief. 3. It hit a token cap If your AOS Credits balance reached a hard cap, work pauses rather than overspending. The mission will surface in your founder summary. Top up credits or raise the cap, and the work continues from where it paused. Nothing is lost. 4. A dependency or integration is not connected Integrations are walled off by default. If a mission needs a tool you have not granted access to, it cannot proceed. Connect the required integration, then resume the mission. 5. The mission genuinely failed If something went wrong, the mission surfaces in your founder summary with the rationale. From there you decide whether to retry, pivot the approach, or kill it. The evidence trail shows exactly where it stopped and why. Can I pause a mission myself? Yes. You can pause any mission mid-flight from Mission Control and resume it later. Pausing does not lose progress. Still stuck? Open a conversation from the in-app support panel or email us, and include the mission name. The evidence trail gives us everything we need to see what happened.

Common issues and quick fixes

Quick answers to the issues founders hit most often in their first weeks on AOS. I do not know what mission to run first The onboarding playbook walks you through it. Most founders pick their messiest priority from the last 30 days, the thing you keep getting pulled back into. That is usually the right first mission. Write it as one plain-English sentence and let the CEO agent scope it. The agents are asking too many questions By design, the CEO agent asks at most two clarifying questions per mission, then proceeds on sensible defaults. If you would rather move faster, accept the defaults. You can always correct course, and every decision is logged so nothing is irreversible without an approval point. Approvals are firing too often (or not enough) The money approval point uses caps you control (defaults: $1,000 per move, $10,000 per week). If you are approving too many small spends, raise the per-move cap. If you want a tighter grip, lower it. The other four approval points are tied to genuinely high-stakes actions and are there to protect you. I cannot tell what the team is doing Open the Mission Control dashboard. It shows who is working on what, the acceptance bar for each mission, and live status. Most founders check it once a day or once a week. You also get the Friday founder summary at 4pm with what shipped, what is blocked, and what waits on you. Work came back that misses the mark Every artifact passes a four-step review against the acceptance bar before it reaches you, but if the bar itself was off, the fix is to refine the brief. Reply on the mission with what is wrong; the department reviewer and QA re-test against the corrected criteria. Token spend looks high Check the token ledger. It is itemized and hard-capped. Running fewer missions in parallel and tightening mission non-goals are the two fastest ways to bring spend down. See How tokens and AOS Credits work. Billing and account questions Hosting is $100/month, pausable or cancellable anytime, with no contract. To pause, cancel, or switch to annual ($900/year), or for any billing question, reach us from the in-app support panel or by email. How to reach a human Open the in-app support panel or email the founder team. Include the mission name if your question is about a specific piece of work, and the evidence trail tells us the rest.

Frequently asked questions

Short answers to the questions founders ask most about AOS. For deeper detail, follow the linked articles. What is AOS, in one line? A private operating system you install inside your own company that stands up a 61-agent company across 8 departments, with a mission system, an evidence trail, and 5 approval points. See What is AOS. Is this just a chatbot? No. A chatbot answers and forgets. AOS scopes real work, assigns it to a named specialist, reviews it four ways, holds the risky parts for your approval, and remembers every decision across missions. How long does setup take? About 20 minutes to install. Your first useful week is mostly calibration: setting caps, running a mission or two, and reading your first Friday summary. See How to install AOS in about 20 minutes and Your first week with AOS. What does it cost? A one-time install (1,000 dollars for the first 100 founders, then 5,000), 100 dollars per month hosting (or 900 per year), and model tokens billed separately on a capped ledger. No contract, cancel anytime. See AOS pricing. Are tokens included in the price? No. Tokens are separate and hard-capped so the one variable cost stays visible and never surprises you. AOS Credits are available today, BYOK is coming soon. See How tokens and AOS Credits work. What decisions do I still have to make? Five. Money over your cap, public claims under your name, customer data leaving your boundary, production-touching changes, and audit-trail edits. Everything else runs on its own. See The five approval points. Will it touch my real tools or data? Only what you explicitly connect. The default posture is deny, then grant, and moving customer data is itself an approval point. See Permissions and access control and Connecting your tools safely. How do I know the work is any good? Every artifact passes a four-step review (builder, QA, reviewer, security) against a written acceptance bar before it reaches you. The evidence trail records each verdict. See Acceptance criteria. How does it remember things? Operating memory carries decisions and their reasoning across missions, so you do not re-explain your company every time. See How AOS remembers. What if a mission gets stuck? It surfaces in your Friday summary as a blocker with the rationale, rather than silently burning tokens. You decide whether to retry, pivot, or kill it. See Why is my mission stuck. Can I cancel? Anytime. No contract. Pause the hosted line whenever you want. The install fee is paid once and your instance and data stay yours. Who is it for? Operating founders running companies roughly between one and a hundred million in revenue who have become the routing bottleneck. It runs alongside your human operating system rather than replacing it. What happens if I stop paying hosting? Managed hosting stops, but your install is a purchase, not a subscription to access. Your instance and data remain yours, and the install fee is never re-charged. See What hosting includes. Is my data used to train models? Not without your say-so. Training opt-ins are part of the customer-data approval point, so any such crossing waits for you. See Data and security.