Autonomy levels

The three autonomy modes, Ask, Propose, and Auto: defined by what the system can spend, not by a marketing scale.

iHarness runs at one of three autonomy levels. The levels are not a mood setting; each one is defined by what the system is allowed to spend, credits, sends, budget, your audience's attention.

The three modes

Mode	What it does	Spend
Ask	Reads, diagnoses, explains. Proposes nothing unprompted.	Spend verbs are absent
Propose	Raises cards, stages work, and waits for your click.	Present, but gated on your approval
Auto	Completes an arc without a human.	Full, within caps and behind a kill switch

Absence is a stronger guarantee than a gate

The distinction that matters most is between Ask and everything else. In Ask mode the ability to spend is not gated behind an approval; it is not there at all. A gate can be misconfigured; an absent capability cannot fire. That is why diagnosis and explanation are always safe to ask for, at any level.

Where the levels meet your day

Propose is where approvals live: staged work arrives as cards in Pulse, and nothing moves until you click. Auto is bounded, not blind: caps limit what an arc can spend, the kill switch stops everything, and every decision still writes its trace before it runs. The per-tool controls that shape all three levels are covered in Gates, and the practice of widening autonomy as judgment proves out is covered in Autopilot vs approval-first.