Staged Autonomy and Human Review

Treating autonomy as binary leads to systems that are either too constrained to be useful or too unconstrained to be safe. The practical model is staged autonomy. ### Stages and Checkpoints In a staged model, an agent earns broader authority by accumulating evidence at well-defined checkpoints. Each stage corresponds to a class of action — read, suggest, draft, execute — and each stage requires a different review surface. ### Human Review as Infrastructure Human review is not a fallback for AI failure; it is an infrastructure surface that the system is built around. When review is treated as core infrastructure, agents stop being designed to evade it and start being designed to feed it.