Use case
Nightly reports that are drafted automatically and sent deliberately
Run an agent every night to pull metrics and draft a report. Sending email to customers is irreversible, so it waits in escrow for a person to approve.
A nightly report is two jobs: gathering numbers, which is safe to automate completely, and sending them to people, which is not always safe to undo.
How does the run go?
- At 02:00 the schedule starts the run, after checking the budget.
- The agent reads metrics through scoped connectors. Reading is pure, so it runs freely.
- It drafts the report and asks to send it. If the recipients are customers,
email.sendis irreversible. - The send is held in escrow. An approval request appears in Slack with the draft attached.
- You approve in the morning. The email is released, and the run ends with a receipt.
Why not just send it automatically?
Because a wrong number in an internal dashboard is a bug, and a wrong number in a customer email is an incident. Escrow lets the agent do all of the work and leaves one decision to a person. If the same report goes out cleanly every night, save the approval as a rule and the queue stays empty.
Updated
Questions
- Does the agent send the report on its own?
- Internal delivery can run within policy. Emailing customers is irreversible, so it is held in escrow until a person approves, then released when the run commits.
- What does it cost while it waits for approval?
- The agent is paused while it waits, so it does not use compute. Its snapshot counts as storage.
Related
- Approvals without rubber-stampingAsking a person to approve every agent action turns oversight into clicking yes. Effect classes, escrow and saved rules keep approvals rare and meaningful.
- EscrowEffect escrow stages an agent's irreversible actions, like sending email, in an outbox and releases them only after approval and when the run commits.
- Competitor research agents that report back and shut downSend several agents to research competitors in parallel, each in its own sandbox, under one dollar budget, and get a single brief with a receipt for how it was made.
- How it worksHow Heighliner runs an agent fleet: describe it in a manifest, plan and quote every change, apply it, and govern risky actions with approvals.