What a gate is
An approval gate is a rule that pauses a certain kind of action until you approve it. Sending money, publishing something public, changing a customer record, and deleting data are sensible defaults. When an agent wants to do one of these, the work pauses and an approval lands in your queue with the full context and the reasoning behind it.
Read the why, not just the what. The reasoning trail lets you judge the decision, not just rubber-stamp the action.
Tuning gates
You can set thresholds. If you trust the CEO with marketing spend under a limit but not over, set that limit and the small payments stop interrupting you. The goal is to receive few approvals, each of which genuinely deserves a human. A queue full of trivial approvals means your gates are too tight, and you will start approving without reading, which defeats the purpose.
The kill switch
Separate from gates, the kill switch stops every agent in the colony immediately. Nothing is lost; work pauses and waits. You can also pause a single agent and let the CEO route around it. Use the stop without hesitation when a plan is clearly wrong.
The stop is reversible. After you halt the colony you can read what each agent was doing, correct the course in a sentence, and resume. This is why it is safe to use early and often: stopping costs you nothing but a pause, while letting a bad plan run because you were not sure can cost you real money and real cleanup.
Tuning gates over time
Your gates are not set once and forgotten. The right cadence is to review them whenever the approval queue feels wrong. If you are approving more than a handful of things a day, your gates are too tight and you will start rubber-stamping, which is worse than no gate at all. If something risky slipped through without your sign-off, a gate is too loose and needs tightening.
A healthy steady state is a small queue of approvals that each genuinely deserve a human, arriving a few times a day, not a few times an hour. Treat the size and quality of your approval queue as a signal about whether your governance is calibrated.
What a good approval looks like
Every approval shows you the action and the reasoning behind it. A good one to approve is an action whose rationale you agree with and whose cost is justified. A good one to reject is an action whose reasoning is thin, whose cost is out of proportion, or which repeats something that already failed. The reasoning trail is there so you can judge the decision, not just the action.
This article is part of the launch docs set; boundaries and depth are still being reviewed with engineering and will keep sharpening.
