Autopilot / The approval gate

The approval gate

One screen, three panels, one button. It is the only thing autopilot asks you to do after setup, and it is reached exactly once.

Panel one — what I made

Every flow it wrote, each with a phone preview rendered by the same engine that will run on the device, and its trigger stated in one sentence: “a later session, from someone who has not granted notifications”. Under each flow is its validation report — the device × language matrix, and what the authoring loop had to repair to get there.

Panel two — what I will do

Stated as commitments, not as settings you have to go and find:

  • The autonomy level it will run at, and what that level lets it do without asking.
  • The holdout share it will keep back, permanently, to audit its own claims.
  • The guardrail metrics it will watch, and the fact that a breach rolls a change back on its own.
  • Its weekly experiment budget — how much it may change at once.
  • What it will be able to measure at your traffic, and — plainly — what it will not. An account too small to read a revenue result is told so here, before approving, rather than discovering it in a report three months later.

Panel three — what I will never touch

The screens that stay frozen, and the things that are never editable at any autonomy level: your price display, legal footers, and anything you lock on this screen. Locks are enforced where flows are represented, not by instructing a model to behave — a patch that would violate one cannot be expressed, so it cannot be generated, validated or published.

What pressing approve actually does

In one transaction, and all of it in the audit log:

  1. Publishes the drafted flows.
  2. Activates their triggers, so the server starts answering your presenter with them.
  3. Writes the optimization policy and the grant — the machine-readable version of panel two, including your locks.
  4. Opens the holdout.
  5. Starts the canary ramp. Approved does not mean 100% — the first flow rolls out gradually, with guardrails watching.

Payment

In the finished design, the approval gate and the payment gate are the same screen — you see what the system produced for your own app, in your own theme, before you are asked for anything. While autopilot is in beta there is nothing to pay, so today the gate is approval only. See Pricing for what will change and what we commit to regardless.

If you would rather not

Under the button is a link into the editor. Everything autopilot wrote is an ordinary flow: open it, change it, publish it yourself, or throw it away. Approving is not the only way out of this screen, and choosing the editor does not disable anything.