Entitlement and runtime choice, end to end

The flow#

1. Trigger — the engine has work it could do, or a person asks for something on a screen.
2. User or external event — a message arrives, a follow-up falls due, or somebody presses a control.
3. Authentication and workspace resolution — the workspace is fixed, and with it the plan that applies. The operator's own workspace has no plan and no gates.
4. Ingest — the request or the work item is admitted for consideration. Neither gate has been consulted yet.
5. Canonical record — the record the work concerns already exists and is unaffected by either gate.
6. Reasoning — the engine decides what it would do. It is worth noticing that this happens before the gates: a refusal is a refusal to act, not a refusal to think.
7. Knowledge, memory and rules — applied as usual, since they shape what would be done rather than whether it may be.
8. Autonomy and approval — the runtime gate. Is this channel switched on, and at what mode? Off and draft_only both stop a send, for different reasons.
9. Action through a provider — the entitlement gate. Does the plan permit this capability, and is there allowance left today?
10. Result — the action runs, or it is refused with the reason that stopped it: a plan reason or a setting reason, never a vague one.
11. Relationship, timeline and memory — a refusal is still an event about the work. The record shows the attempt and why it stopped.
12. Audit, usage and Needs You — usage is metered against the allowance; a refusal surfaces in Needs You so it is somebody's decision rather than silence.

Why the two are kept apart#

Collapsing them would make the product easier to describe and much worse to operate. A workspace that pays for a channel and has deliberately switched it off is in a legitimate state, not an error to be corrected. A workspace that has switched everything on and is not entitled to one capability should hear a commercial answer rather than watch a control silently do nothing.

The separation also means a plan change is not a settings change. Moving to a different plan does not switch anything on by itself: the capability becomes permitted, and a person still decides whether Connect may use it. That is the conservative direction, and it is the right one — nobody wants a plan change to start sending mail on Monday morning.

Allowance is a third thing again#

Inside an entitlement there is a daily allowance, and spending it is neither a plan problem nor a settings problem. Work is held rather than dropped: the refusal is recorded, the item stays, and the mail read cursor deliberately does not advance — advancing a cursor on a refusal is how a mail agent loses messages permanently.

So there are three answers to "why did that not happen", and they need different actions: the plan does not permit it, nobody switched it on, or today's allowance is spent and it resumes. Needs You shows the third rather than leaving it to be inferred from silence.

Working out which gate stopped you#

1. Look at the capability on the autonomy screen first.

   Result Off or draft_only explains the silence immediately and takes seconds to change if that is what you want.

2. If it is switched on, look at plan and usage.

   Result A capability the plan does not include and an allowance that is spent look identical from a conversation and are different problems.

3. Check Needs You before concluding nothing happened.

   Result A refusal that needs a person is queued there, which means the answer is usually already waiting rather than needing to be worked out.

4. If all three look right and nothing is happening, treat it as a fault.

   Result Connect appears to be doing nothing starts from that point rather than repeating these checks.

When a plan lapses#

A lapse changes the first gate and leaves the second alone, which is why recovery is usually undramatic: settings survive, autonomy rules survive, and records survive. What stops is the permission to act. A plan lapsing, end to end and When a plan lapses cover what continues and what does not.

Questions#

Related#

• Entitlements and runtime choice
• Usage and allowances
• The four autonomy modes
• A plan lapsing, end to end
• The allowance is spent