Ask & Plan, Build, Auto

Under the message box, on the left, there is a small switch. It says Auto, Build or Ask & Plan, and it decides how far the agent may go by itself in this conversation.

It is not a promise the agent makes. It is the set of tools it is handed.

Ask & Plan

Read-only. The agent gets no tool that writes anything — not to your data, not to a file, not a command. It can look at everything you can look at, and then it answers.

Use it when you want to think before anything moves: "How would you split this project into phases?", "What is wrong with our invoicing process?"

Because the writing tools were never sent to it, there is no way around this level and nothing to argue about. If you ask for a change here, the agent says plainly that it needs Build.

Build

The normal setting, and the one you will use most. The agent may read, may write ordinary records, and asks before anything consequential — see when the agent asks first.

That is the balance most work wants: it gets on with the small things and stops at the ones you would want to see.

Auto

The agent acts without asking, including the consequential steps. Use it for a long, well-defined job you have thought about: "Go through the open time entries and match each one to its rate card."

Two things stay true even here:

• It still acts as you. It cannot touch a record your role cannot touch.
• Anything that leaves your system still asks. Submitting a form on a website is not an in-house action, and Auto does not turn it into one.

Which one should I use?

Start in Build. Move to Ask & Plan when you want a second opinion rather than an action, and to Auto when you have described a job precisely enough that you would not want to be asked about each step.

The switch is per conversation, so a careless setting cannot follow you around.