Hold the ceiling at A3 for portfolio & intake. Triage, estimation and dependency mapping are agentic. What the engineering organization spends its quarter on is a leadership commitment. Raise it only after two consecutive quarters where the override rate stays under five percent and every override has a written cause.

Keep the repeatable request volume in the spine and pull the exception tail back into the function. The spine is cheaper per unit; the tail is where the context that prevents rework actually sits.

Hold the ceiling at A2 for architecture & design. Agents author the design options and the decision record. Architecture decisions constrain years of future work, so a review board ratifies them. Raise it only after two consecutive quarters where the override rate stays under five percent and every override has a written cause.

Keep the repeatable design decision volume in the spine and pull the exception tail back into the function. The spine is cheaper per unit; the tail is where the context that prevents rework actually sits.

Redesign the lane around exception density rather than volume. Volume is already absorbed; the cost that remains is concentrated in a small share of design decision cases that no current agent resolves without a human.

Hold the ceiling at A4 for build. Code generation and dependency maintenance are near-touchless. A human still approves every merge into a protected branch — that gate is the whole control. Raise it only after two consecutive quarters where the override rate stays under five percent and every override has a written cause.

Agents in this lane may act without a human when the request sits inside the stated value, risk and confidence envelope. Outside it, the unit holds at a gate with a named approver and a running clock.

Every autonomous decision writes inputs, the rule version applied, the model and prompt version, the output and a reversal path. An action with no evidence record is treated as a control failure, not a fast decision.

Escalation is mandatory when confidence falls below the floor, when two options sit inside the confidence band, or when a break condition on a ratified position fires. VP Engineering Operations owns the response clock.

The ceiling for this lane is 74 on the platform scale. Triage, estimation and dependency mapping are agentic. What the engineering organization spends its quarter on is a leadership commitment. The ceiling is a governance decision, not a technical limit, and only VP Engineering Operations can propose moving it.

Agents in this lane may act without a human when the design decision sits inside the stated value, risk and confidence envelope. Outside it, the unit holds at a gate with a named approver and a running clock.

Every autonomous decision writes inputs, the rule version applied, the model and prompt version, the output and a reversal path. An action with no evidence record is treated as a control failure, not a fast decision.