The four autonomy modes

The difference that costs people a week#

The intent behind draft_only is the part that gets lost. It is not a stricter ask_before_send; it is a silent one. A workspace evaluating Connect on a live mailbox uses it to read a fortnight of drafts at leisure and judge the quality, without an approval queue nagging anybody and without the risk that a tired approval sends something nobody read. Because it never asks, nothing accumulates as a task. Because it never asks, nothing goes out either.

Each mode in full#

off

The channel is disabled. Connect does not draft on it, does not queue anything for it and does not place calls on it. Inbound messages are still received and still appear in Conversations — turning a channel off is a decision about output, not about blindness. Use it when a mailbox is being migrated, or when a number is registered but not yet meant to be answered by Connect.

draft_only

Connect does the whole job up to the send: it reads, grounds the answer in Knowledge and Memory, writes the reply, and stops. Nothing enters the approval queue. The draft sits with the conversation, where a person can read it, edit it and send it by hand if they choose.

ask_before_send

Every outbound on that channel becomes a held action with a decision attached. It appears in Waiting For You and in Needs You, alongside the message it answers, and it goes out unchanged the moment somebody approves it — through the same send boundary a person's own send uses.

autonomous

Connect acts without asking, within the gates. The gates are not optional and not part of the mode: a suppressed or do-not-contact recipient, a spent daily allowance, a channel with no provider that can carry the message, and the workspace budget all still refuse. An autonomous channel therefore still produces refusals, and they are recorded.

Choosing one#

1. Start a new channel at ask_before_send.

   Result You see every reply before a customer does, and the queue tells you how often Connect is right without you having to sample.

2. If the queue is becoming a chore and the approvals are almost all straight yeses, move the channel to autonomous and keep ask_before_send on the contacts that matter most.

   Result The narrowest scope wins, so the exceptions survive the channel-wide change. See Exceptions to a rule.

3. If you want to read Connect's judgement without committing to a queue, use draft_only for a fixed period and set a reminder to review.

   Result Nothing is sent, nothing is asked, and the drafts are there to read against the messages that prompted them.

4. If a channel must go quiet — an out-of-hours number, a mailbox mid-migration — set off rather than emptying the credentials.

   Result Inbound keeps arriving and stays readable; only the output stops, and the change is one field to undo.

What each mode does not change#

None of the four modes changes how Connect *reasons*. Triage, grounding, research and drafting run identically under all of them; the mode decides only what happens to the finished action. That is why a draft_only workspace is a fair test of quality — you are reading the same output an autonomous workspace would have sent.

None of them changes what Connect is allowed to know, either. Memory resolves through the same four tiers whatever the mode is, and a block recorded against a contact holds across every channel regardless. A mode is a rule about sending, and it is only that.

Questions#

Related#

• What Connect may do
• Autonomy scopes
• Setting autonomy per channel
• The gates that always apply
• Approvals
• The approval is not in the queue