What does it need access to?

Read access to the named intake sources and write access to the draft queue only. Never send, and never the systems the work will eventually touch.

What happens to drafts nobody promotes?

They are discarded on a cadence, with the discard recorded, so the draft queue does not become a second inbox that someone has to clear.

The inbox is where work is requested and where the record of it usually fails to start

Today

A translation from message to task done by hand

Work arrives as messages rather than as tasks.
Someone reads each one and decides whether it is work, what kind, and who owns it, and that translation is where things get dropped or done twice.
The fear about letting an agent near the inbox is that it will act: reply to the sender, open something, commit you to something.
The useful pattern is one where it only ever drafts, and a person decides what the draft becomes.

With agents

Inert drafts, promoted only by a named person

Intake stops depending on who read the inbox that morning.
Nothing is acted on that a person did not accept.
The record starts at the request.

The proactive drafting pattern

Proactive drafting is a pattern: an agent turns an inbound signal into a drafted unit of governed work, and a person promotes or discards it. Every item below describes the pattern.

An intake source is a named channel the agent is permitted to read

A shared inbox, a ticket queue. The permission is explicit and scoped to that channel; the agent reads nothing it was not named to read.

It decides whether the signal describes work at all

Most messages do not. Those are left alone, with the reason recorded, so a person can check what it passed over.

For a signal that does, it drafts a work order

What is being asked, by whom, what it depends on, a proposed owner, and the source message attached as evidence. The drafted work order is an artifact with the same fields every time.

The draft is inert

It has no owner until a person accepts it. It dispatches nothing. It replies to nobody. Inertness is the property that makes the pattern safe to run against a live inbox.

Human gate

A named person opens the draft and promotes it into governed work, edits it first, or discards it. Nothing enters the workflow without that promotion, and How It Works describes what a work order becomes once it does.

Duplicates are caught at drafting

A signal that matches work already open is attached to that work as a note rather than drafted again as a second request for the same thing.

What a promoted draft becomes is a plan or a routine

A one-off request becomes a plan, or a task inside one. A request that keeps arriving is evidence for a routine. The plans and routines entry defines both shapes.

Results

What changes when the agent only ever drafts

Intake independent of the reader

Every signal that describes work becomes a draft with the same fields and the source attached, whoever was on the inbox.

Reach that ends at the draft

The draft is inert by design and the promotion step is the gate, so the agent's reach ends at the draft queue.

Provenance from the first moment

The source message is attached to the draft, so the work order carries its own provenance from the first moment it exists.

Where this fits

Concept

This is the entry the library points at whenever work enters the system from an outside signal; its sibling, observation, covers work found inside the record. The Platform page is the way up from here. How It Works describes the work order and its gates; this entry describes the pattern by which a message becomes a draft of one, and stops there.

AAOS Platform

How It Works

Questions, answered

No. Drafting is the whole of what it does. A reply is a separate workflow with its own gate, and it is no part of this pattern.

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