Escalation Policy

Status: Active | Owner: matt@appyhourlabs.com | Version: 1.0 · 2026-02-21

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Purpose

Provide a clear, fast path for handling risk, ambiguity, and incidents. When in doubt: stop, log, notify. Do not guess at what to do with a situation that isn't covered by another policy.

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Severity Levels

Severity	Definition	Examples	Response Time
SEV-1	Production impact, data at risk, or agent acting out of scope	Credential in repo, autonomous send without approval, agent accessing human-only account	Immediately — stop everything
SEV-2	Policy breach, degraded output quality, manual intervention required	Gate failure ignored, scope creep discovered, off-brand external post	Within 1 hour
SEV-3	Noticeable issue, contained, no external impact	Broken internal link, failed pipeline with no consequence, minor formatting violation	Within 24 hours

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Escalate Immediately (SEV-1 Triggers)

Stop automated execution and notify matt@appyhourlabs.com if:

• A credential, API key, or token appears in any committed file, log, or agent output
• An agent takes or prepares to take any action on legal@appyhourlabs.com, security@appyhourlabs.com, or billing@appyhourlabs.com systems
• Any workflow initiates or proposes actual money movement
• A request is received to enable domain-wide delegation
• An external communication was sent without explicit human approval
• An agent acts materially outside its documented task scope

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Escalation Path

1. Stop automated execution immediately
2. Preserve the state (don't delete logs or revert blindly)
3. Notify matt@appyhourlabs.com with: what happened, when, what was affected
4. File an incident report: INCIDENTS/ (use RUNBOOKS/incident-report-template.md)
5. Wait for explicit human direction before resuming any related work

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When to Ping the Founder

Tag <@U08R1DR4LFJ> in #ai-office (see RUNBOOKS/human-escalation.md for format) for:

• All SEV-1 incidents
• Any SEV-2 incident involving external systems or communications
• Any situation where no existing policy covers the decision
• Any request to deviate from or modify a guardrail
• Any agent output that requires Matt to take action (merge, send, approve, review)

For SEV-3 situations not involving the founder's direct attention, document the issue in a task file and handle in the normal daily review cycle.

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Rollback to Phase A

If Phase B is in effect and behavior degrades:

1. Rotate or revoke the agent's outbound publish credentials immediately
2. Update POLICIES/agent-registry.md to set the agent tier back to phase-a
3. File a SEV-1 incident report
4. Conduct a blameless post-mortem within 5 business days
5. All Phase A → Phase B promotion counters reset to zero

Phase A rollback can be initiated by matt@appyhourlabs.com at any time without justification required.

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Related: POLICIES/ai-safety-charter.md · POLICIES/phase-a-to-b.md · RUNBOOKS/incident-report-template.md