Train, monitor, manage · Lesson 2 of 6
How does the Ladder work, and how does a line become autonomous?
Published September 8, 2026 · Updated September 25, 2026
The Ladder is two rungs, set per line on a Team. Supervised: the act waits as a decision addressed to a named person, and one click sends it. Autonomous: it runs and leaves a Receipt. A person moves a line up with one explicit act, with its track record beside it. Merge is always a person's click.
What are the two rungs?
Supervised and autonomous, set per line.
At supervised, the line’s act is minted as a decision, pre-filled and addressed to a named member of the Team, and one click that is still that person’s dispatches it. On the Team page it reads “supervised by Priya”. At autonomous, the act dispatches on its own and leaves a Receipt, capped per ticket wherever a loop is possible. It reads “autonomous”, in the quiet green.
Every line on a Team starts at its default, which the Create a Team screen shows before you commit. Reeve reads plans autonomous from the first day, because a critique is advice. Proctor’s review line starts autonomous too: its review posts on the pull request on its own, and on a person’s pull request a clean review reads “approval advised”, so a person still approves. Wright’s plan and build lines and Bailey’s propose line start supervised by the Team’s owner.
What does supervised mean day to day?
That the decision waits for you, where you are. A supervised Wright brings the plan back to the case file and to Slack for Approve plan. A Proctor line moved to supervised posts its findings and waits for you to confirm its approval. A supervised Bailey puts the next tickets under Proposed with a case each. Any member of the Team may answer, and the record says who did. A decision open for more than a day reminds its person each morning.
What does the track record measure?
Plain counts per line, over time and per rule: accepted as proposed, edited, sent back, auto-shipped, and reversed. Misses stay on the record beside the wins and are not swept off after a good week.
It sits beside the line, “22 of the last 25 accepted as proposed”, so the person deciding whether to make that line autonomous reads the claim and its evidence on the same page. Lines that fire a few times a week show no record line yet. The Agents page is the same record across every Team, one row per line.
Who moves a line up?
A person, always. Open the line from the Team page, change its Authority blank from supervised to autonomous, and Save. The record is beside the blank when you do it, and the change is recorded with who made it, so anyone can ask later why a line was trusted with something.
Setting a line back is the same blank in the other direction, and it takes effect on the next run. Nothing moves a rung on its own: not a good week, not a bad one.
What does a reversal do?
It counts. Reverting something a line shipped autonomously lands on that line’s record as one reversal, beside everything else it has done. It changes no level by itself, because one incident is a comment and a pattern is a decision, and the decision is yours. Three in two weeks is a reason to set the line back to supervised. When an Agent gets it wrong walks the rest of that runbook.
Why is the Ladder per line, not per Agent or per Team?
Because trust is local, and because a line has exactly one act. Proctor may have earned autonomy on the web app while the payments repo is still new to it. One rung across the workspace would either hold back the work it knows or push it into work it does not. And a Team has no rung of its own: Pause is the brake, and the workspace’s daily ceiling is the budget.
Each craft also carries a ceiling. Bailey proposes and never ships. Its line starts supervised, so each proposal waits for a person; turned up to autonomous, the Team takes its own top proposals into Plan, up to the tickets per day you set. Deploy and data-migration capabilities cap at supervised.
What never moves, whatever the rung?
The floor. Merge is always a person’s click: on GitHub, or in the app from the Review case file when your workspace’s Merge in app switch is on, and then only for the Team’s owner and its supervisors. There is no merge line and no autonomous merge. Wright opens drafts, Proctor’s approving verdict takes them out of draft, and the merge waits for you.
Inside that floor, the caps hold at every rung: four tickets in flight per Team by default, two fix rounds per pull request, and the workspace’s daily ceiling. The audit trail behind all of it is covered in security.
Common questions
Does a line move itself to autonomous once its numbers look good?
No. The track record sits beside the line so you can read it, and it never moves the rung by itself. There is no suggestion engine and no setting that opens autonomy in advance of the work. A person changes the Authority blank on the line, and the record is right there when they do.
If I make Proctor autonomous on one Team, does it change on the others?
No. The rung lives on the line, which is one Agent doing one thing on one Team. The same Proctor can be autonomous on the web app and supervised on the payments repository, because the review norms and the accountable person are different in each place.
What does autonomous actually let a line do?
Dispatch its one act without asking, with a Receipt, capped per ticket where a loop is possible. It never means unattended: every act is on the record, the workspace's daily ceiling still bounds it, Pause still stops it, and merge stays a person's click whatever any line is set to.
What happens if I revert something a line shipped on its own?
The reversal is one more count on that line's track record, beside accepted as proposed, edited, and sent back. It changes no level on its own. If the pattern has changed, you set the line back to supervised, which is the same blank in the other direction.