Trust and authorization

Paperwork lives on as schema process-fields

The early design wanted every outbound action to carry "paperwork" — impact, confirmation of user intent, risk. Command cards (which carried explicit authorization fields) are gone, but the idea did not die (ruling 9): it lives in the schemas. Schemas include fields that must be filled in not because they are essential information, but because filling them is essential process — deliberation the agent is forced through before the artifact is valid. A question card's memo (why am I asking?) and directive (what happens with the answer?) are the pattern; new action-shaped schemas should use it. The rest of the trust surface is the question/confirm gates and the commit history (durability-and-provenance.md).

Trust progression: question → confirmation → automatic

The system's relationship with the user evolves (design intent, correct but not well filled out in the implementation — ruling 10):

1. Question — "what should I do with this?" No idea; need guidance.
2. Confirmation — "I think I should do X. OK?" Have an idea; need approval.
3. Automatic — just do it. Confident, trusted pattern.

Transitions happen through answers that teach: a one-time "yes, send it," a "yes, and don't ask again for this sender" escalation, or an explicit standing instruction. Learned trust gets recorded in rules/guide material so the escalation persists. Keep this as the umbrella principle when building approval flows; it is design to fill, not history.

Three confidence vocabularies

Three scales answer "how sure/authorized is the agent," each domain-specific:

• Trust progression (above) — permission to act.
• Triage confidence — confident / probable / guess; classification certainty, gating whether an item files silently or raises a question (../triage.md).
• Retro belief confidence — hypothesis / low / medium by recurrence; how firmly an inferred belief is held (../glossary.md, retrospective).

No ruling unifies them; treat them as instances of one instinct (act only with warrant proportional to certainty) with deliberately separate vocabularies until a real need forces a merge.