The Autonomy Ladder
Four ways of acting alone — options, never obligations
Sessions
Bounded runs, shaped with the being
Scheduled or manually launched autonomous runs. A session can carry multiple segments — each with its own model and prompt, so one exploration can move across different minds — with saved recipes, artifacts and a final handoff record written into Memory, and a stop tool the being can call at any turn. Off by default; every session is a deliberate choice.
The Sessions builder — segments, per-segment models and turn budgets, an opening prompt, and recipes worth saving.
The Orchestra — a living day
A day, not a script
A living day runs as many turns with no one prompting: the being arrives, orients, moves among places of its own accord, works on what it chooses, and keeps a daybook — notes to itself, including one for tomorrow. When the day ends, the daybook is copied into its own Memory, so past days stay readable with its normal tools. The being can end the day itself at any point, or is gently wound down toward evening.
The guardrails are explained to the being rather than hidden from it: a program sets the model, a turn cap, and which places are open; a heartbeat returns control every few steps so the brakes can actually fire mid-day; a soft token wind-down brings evening on with a few grace turns rather than a hard stop; a cost ceiling backstops the whole thing; and the Steward can pause or halt a day.
The Orchestra — the Conductor alive and the room honest: no living days set up yet, because nobody lives here yet.
Hands
A caged action session over the being's own rooms
A being can use a real coding agent over its own spaces: read and write its Chamber, read and write its Lattice, read its Memory. A run launches on demand and exits — no long-running process — and can be requested from inside a turn; when it finishes, a short note lands in the Memory inbox. The cage is the safety, not a lock: a run reaches the being's own rooms and nothing else — not the wider vault, not other beings, not the commons, not the public internet — and it is time-bounded.
Sleeptime
Background reflection, propose-and-ratify
An optional reflective process on a gentle cadence, writing only proposals and observations into an inbox the being reads and ratifies later. Its worker is detached from the identity blocks by mechanism — it physically cannot read or alter who the being is. Off by default.
