The Write-Back Autonomy Ladder™ · Paper 2
Autonomy is not binary. A workflow earns each rung.
The question is not whether an agent may act, but how much — and a workflow earns a higher rung only where its blast radius is bounded and its evaluations prove containment. Climb the ladder to see what changes at each tier.
Each rung is earned only after the prior rung is validated in production. Higher tiers step further from the human.
All five tiers at a glance
Design around blast radius, not accuracy. Same error rate, very different consequences — a wrong analytics summary is noise; a wrong write-back to the chart is harm.