Standing approvals

Standing approvals

A standing approval is a human approval given ahead of time: one person pre-approves one exact tool for one agent in one scope, with a daily ceiling and an expiry. When a run parks waiting for approval and a mandate covers it, the platform decides the park immediately — with the grant owner’s name and the mandate’s id on the decision, exactly as if they had clicked. The run’s trail reads “Approved by” that person, because that person did approve it; they just did it in daylight.

When to grant one

Grant a standing approval when all three are true: the action’s arguments come from content the platform rightly distrusts (logs, messages), so every use would otherwise wait for a click; the moment of use is when nobody is awake; and the tool itself carries structural guards that make the worst malicious input survivable. The Cloudflare block list is the shaped example: literal addresses only, protected ranges refused in code, its own ceiling, blocks that expire.

A standing approval releases the park — it does not make a tool safe. That judgement is yours, and the required reason field is where you write it. The block list’s unblock_ip is the worked counter-example: do not grant it a mandate. Removing protection is exactly the action a misled agent should never take unattended, and the human click is its ceiling.

The mandate’s bounds

• One exact tool id, instance included. Patterns are refused: a mandate must know what it covers.
• A daily ceiling (at most 100). Covering and spending a use are one atomic step, so the ceiling holds under concurrency; once spent, parks wait for a click again until midnight.
• An expiry, at most 90 days. Renewal is a deliberate re-decision.
• Revocation is immediate and keeps the row: the trail shows the mandate and its end.

Who may grant

Granting needs its own permission (approval:grant, Admin by default) — approving a class of future actions is strictly more than clicking one card, which any Approver can do. Creation, revocation and every single use land in the administrative trail.