Earned Autonomy / by David Reynolds

Intro

Credibility with a serious reader depends on claiming exactly the right amount. Everything on this site sits in one of three tiers, and the tier is marked beside every concept's title. Where a figure comes from a survey rather than telemetry, the text says so. Where I have relied on press reporting rather than a primary source, it is listed as open below until I have checked it.

Whose claims to trust about what

[ASIDE from ADDENDUM-01 §D3, Ciaran Martin, with credit line]

The three tiers

Shared ground · one block. Models are commoditising. Context and operating state are the durable value. Model-agnosticism and bring-your-own-key. The pyramid-to-diamond image. The AI-workforce metaphor. Point-in-time review is insufficient for agents. Software went first and nobody will have one agent (The tell).

Converging · two blocks · credited and extended. Autonomy ladders (Amazon's earned trust, Deutsche Bahn's three stages, AWS's let agents earn their autonomy). Agent registers with named owners. The automation-versus-transformation distinction (Salim Ismail). Agents-without-mortgages (Greg Meyers). The dynamo precedent (Paul David). Per-agent identity, runtime policy checkpoints, approval gates and continuous evaluation (Microsoft, 2026 transparency report). The lag; the tell; settled and unsettled; the register; what is scarce; should it exist.

Distinctive · three blocks · argued with confidence. Earned versus granted autonomy with criteria published in advance and automatic demotion. The two-shocks reading of the diamond and the falsification date. The Curriculum Grid. The supervision ceiling applied to agent orchestration. The apprenticeship ledger. Claimed versus banked as the diligence test. The orchestrator as a senior individual-contributor role no org chart measures. Least intelligence necessary as doctrine. Egress per item as the auditable privacy number. The limit case. The Boundary and the vendor line. The Autonomy Map. Worth, and to whom (the three askers). Ninety days as a publishing schedule. The mandate as five things and a dissolution test.

Concepts by tier

[Generated from concept frontmatter: three lists of concept names linking to /c/<slug>.]

Open items · verify before I lean on them

These circulate widely and I have used them; they trace to reporting rather than to filings. Status changes here when I have checked each one.

  1. Linklaters trainee intake 100 → 60 for 2027 (Legal Cheek). Open.
  2. PwC UK graduate intake 1,500 → 1,300 (press). Open.
  3. Deloitte UK partner promotions 124 → 60; EY UK 74 → 34 (newspaper analysis). Open.
  4. Meta 50 → about 20 direct reports (secondhand). Open.
  5. Manager share −34% over five years, US SMBs (Gusto): exact window. Open.
  6. McKinsey ~60% of agentic task cost in verification: exact phrasing. Open.
  7. Lee et al. (CHI 2025): confirm the "higher confidence in the tool, less critical thinking" finding against the paper itself. Open.

Sources

[Chapter 12 of the paper, voice-passed, with the "Vendor governance, 2026" additions from ADDENDUM-02 §O, every entry linked where a URL is known in data/README.md.]