Autopilot — what it actually does

Once configured, Autopilot works from its tab on the Noot, which has three parts.

Plan this project

Generate a plan turns the brief into board columns, phases, tasks with owners, estimates and dates, plus the meetings it thinks the project needs. The result appears as a Proposed plan — a summary and a table of Task / Phase / Priority / Assignee / Due / Est. — which you then apply in one go or discard. Nothing lands until you say so.

Run a management cycle

A cycle reads the project's meetings, action items, board, schedule health and team capacity, then does what a project manager would — inside the autonomy level you set. What it may not apply on its own lands below for approval.

What a cycle can do

• Assign work by real capacity — judged across *every* project a person is on, using team specialty as a signal. If your guardrails empty the pool, it stops rather than falling back to "anyone in the workspace".
• Ask owners for status when work is behind pace, and read the natural-language answer — see Status check-ins.
• Ripple dependencies — when a prerequisite slips, it moves the work waiting on it (start *and* due date, duration preserved, only ever forward) and tells the owner before they're blocked.
• Propose closing a task whose linked pull request has been merged. A proposal, never a silent close — only the team knows whether the task meant more than the PR.
• Log risks to RAID from four sources: blocked dependencies, risks raised in meetings, check-ins answered "at risk", and capacity problems. Each carries its kind, its impact, the meeting that raised it and the task it threatens.
• Answer "will we hit the date" — every open dated task belongs to exactly one thing you committed to, and each commitment gets a projected finish, the slip in days and the task driving it. When the arithmetic says a date cannot hold it writes a risk and escalates it to a person. "Behind pace" is reported and never escalated: a register full of *might* is one nobody opens.
• Say the same about the money — spend that has already left, and the cost of the plan it drew up, against the budget you set. It never revises your number, only reports against it, and a planned line is never counted as spend.
• Propose marking a milestone achieved when every task before it is closed and its date has passed. A proposal, never a silent close, at every autonomy level below Fully Autonomous — whether the thing actually happened is your judgement, not the board's.
• Refuse to hand work to somebody who is away on the day it is due — out sick, on approved leave, or with *Available for scheduling* off. If nobody is available the task is left unassigned and the run log says why, because work quietly unowned reads exactly like work nobody noticed.
• Book and run the meeting rhythm — the project's weekly, a fortnightly one per team, and one at every milestone. It writes each agenda from the board and from what the last meeting produced, invites the people it concerns, makes the room and sends the bot. Move a milestone and its review moves with it, keeping the same invitations and the answers already on them.
• Tell somebody something is waiting. On the default autonomy the whole output of a run is things left for a human, so the project's leadership is notified when a run produced something new. A run that changed nothing says nothing.

Autopilot activity — and undoing things

Every change Autopilot proposed or made is listed with its reasoning. Approve what's waiting, dismiss what you disagree with, and undo anything it already did.