0005 · Agents propose; named people decide

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-08-04

Context

Models are good at first drafts and are not accountable. A process whose purpose is that each approval is made by a named person outside the team cannot let a model's output take effect on its own, nor let one person approve their own request.

Decision

Three of the nine steps have an agent. Its output is stored as a proposal with the agent version that wrote it, and has no effect until a person accepts it — or writes the text by hand instead. The three gates are closed by different roles, the four-eyes check compares the signed-in principal rather than the role, and the role switcher cannot turn one person into two.

Consequences

Every decision on the record has a person and a time. Nothing is automated past a draft, which is slower than an autonomous pipeline and is the product.