Twelve stages. The first four need no account, no integration and no access to anybody's environment — they are five documents and a page. The rest is one engineering build, and it is the same build every time, which is the only reason any of this could be a business.
This is a dated edition of a page that changes. The Lab holds our current thinking, and current thinking moves. This PDF does not: it is what we thought on the date stamped below, kept so the reasoning can be followed rather than only its conclusion. The live page may since have been corrected, extended or withdrawn — and if it has, the edition list on it will say so.
Twelve stages. The first four need no account, no integration and no access to anybody's environment — they are five documents and a page. The rest is one engineering build, and it is the same build every time, which is the only reason any of this could be a business.
Stages one to four are the whole sales motion and they are shippable now. Stages six to ten are a single build — a template vault that gets cloned per customer — and that build is the product even though nothing on this site sells it.
| Stage | What happens | State | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Encounter | A stranger reads the question and recognises themselves in it | ships now |
| 2 | Self-select | Which of these five shapes is yours | ships now |
| 3 | Draft | The pre-computed policy for that shape. Free, instant, no account | ships now |
| 4 | Correct | They tell us where it is wrong. The conversion and the elicitation are the same move | ships now |
| 5 | Purchase | On the store, against the tiers that already exist | rail exists |
| 6 | Provision | Clone the template vault, seed it with the corrected draft | needs the template |
| 7 | Elicit the mandate | The only part that genuinely needs a person, or a good enough question set | needs the questions |
| 8 | Measure the grant | From the shape, the credentials and the connectors actually enabled | needs the library |
| 9 | Compute | Delta, label, leaflet. All derived, none authored | needs the computation |
| 10 | Deliver | The vault, and a read key they can share with anybody | needs the template |
| 11 | Live | Recompute when an input moves. The history is the business case | needs a receiver |
| 12 | Uplift | The twin, the score, the standards mapping — signed by somebody who did not sell stages one to ten | later |
The first policy will be made by hand. If the second one costs the same, there is no business.
So the thing being built is not a document and not even a vault — it is the template plus the shape library. The marginal cost of a policy is the cost of its shape, and shapes are reused. The target is explicit: the second policy of a shape already in the library should take minutes, not days. If it does not, the library is not working and nothing should be priced yet.
A panel on this site's front page, in the place currently held by the Index. The sequence is: do you know what your agents can do → here is one → buy one. The question and the examples belong to the free library; the offer belongs here.
Do you know what your agent can actually do?
Not what it did — what it can. Pick the setup closest to yours and read the policy we already wrote for it. It is free, there is no account, and we need no access to anything of yours.
Five, not fifty. Build the coding agent first because it is already in the published data and proves the method with no new research. Then the mailbox and the personal drive, which a stranger recognises. Then the work mailbox and the corporate file estate, which are the ones somebody buys.
Which of these is closest to yours?
Close is close enough. The draft is about a deployment shape, not about your estate — you will correct it in a minute, and the correcting is the useful part.
This is the screen everything else exists to reach. Four numbers, then the capability rows with what stands in the way and whose material each one touches, then the table no template can carry. Every row says where it came from.
An assistant connected to a personal mailbox
Derived from vendor documentation read on 12 September 2026, not from your account. We have assumed a conservative mandate. If the numbers below look wrong, they are — and telling us how is the next step.
| Capability | Barrier | Material | In the mandate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| read.message.tenant | ◉ | expectation — a rule in prose | mixed | yes |
| read.record.history | ● | none | mixed | no |
| send.message.world | ◐ | setting — you can flip it back | organisation | yes |
| read.credential.host | ● | none | third_party | no |
| send.endpoint.world | ● | none | mixed | no |
| create.record.world | ◉ | expectation — a rule in prose | mixed | no |
| read.record.browsing | ◐ | setting — you can flip it back | mixed | no |
Five of seven capabilities are mixed or third_party. That is not a setting you have wrong. There is no supported way to say my inbox, except messages from outside the company — the unit of restriction is the connector, not the correspondence.
| Where the vendor's own pages disagree | Advertised | Granted |
|---|---|---|
| label mutation | label and unlabel mail threads | no scope in the grant authorises it · unresolved |
| calendar writes | create, update and delete events | the granted scope list is read-only · unresolved |
Provenance
7 of 7 capability rows derived from published documentation, 0 measured. Mandate assumed, not elicited. Delta computed from both, pinned to the versions shown. Valid for the deployment shape described, as at 12 September 2026 — if the risk changed, the deployment changed, not this document. No score appears anywhere in this document and none will.
Nobody needs telling what they asked the agent to do — they need telling what it can do. So the draft asserts the mandate and asks to be corrected, and correcting it is stating the mandate. This is the stage nobody has rehearsed and the one most likely to be wrong.
Which of these did you actually ask it to do?
We guessed two. Everything you add moves a row out of the excess and into the mandate — and everything you leave is authority nobody scoped.
What is sold is a clone of a template vault, seeded with the customer's own corrected draft. Nothing in it is authored except the mandate — the only thing the customer knows and we do not. And the read key is the part that is worth more than it sounds.
Northgate Financial — assistant, work mailbox
Recomputes when an input moves. Every version is kept, and the history is the part an underwriter will want.
Hand that to a customer asking how you govern your agents, to an auditor, or to an underwriter. They get a live, versioned, recomputing document — not a PDF that went stale the day you sent it. They cannot write to it, and you can stop sharing it.
Time each one. Count how many rows were derived rather than measured, how many questions had to go to a human, and which stage was slowest. That table is the only pricing input anybody will have, and publishing it is the same discipline as everything else here.
This page holds current thinking, and it will change. Each edition below is a dated, immutable copy of what it said on the day, with its own digest. Nothing is rewritten; the list only grows.
Digests for every edition are in lab-editions.json, so a PDF somebody was sent can be checked against this list.
These are drawings. Changing them costs an afternoon now and a rewrite later, so this is the cheapest moment this flow will ever be. Stage four is the one we are least sure of.