The Autonomous Layer (M4)
The opt-in background executor and the discipline that makes unattended agency acceptable: its design lineage, the five-phase walk, the single chokepoint, the brakes, the honest caveats, and what shipped.
Overview
A user who has opted in can attach watches (trigger a session when a document arrives in a watched knowledge base), create schedules (run on a cron expression), accumulate per-user memory (proposed facts the user keeps or dismisses), and build a precedent board (recurring document/clause patterns the agent observed). Each trigger spawns one autonomous session: a single run of the five-phase executor against a target (a KB, a query, an arriving file). The session runs to completion, halts on a brake, or fails — and in every terminal case it leaves an auditable row plus (on the expected stops) a receipt.
The reason for the heavy brake machinery is the central design constraint: an agent acting unattended is only acceptable if every action it can take is bounded and recorded. The chokepoint is where that boundedness lives.