Decide what waits for you

Some things wait for the owner’s word: a change that would become the new best, an audit, a subjective goal, a proposal to end a campaign, a rig’s new key and a full reset. This page shows where they wait and what each button does. Campaigns go on while a decision waits: agents keep working from the current champion.

Find what waits

Open Overview, the first page in the sidebar on the left. Its Needs you block lists every decision across every rig, grouped by kind, oldest first. When nothing waits, it says Nothing waits for you. The campaigns go on by themselves.

The count also shows beside Overview in the sidebar, and as Needs you in the status bar, the line along the bottom of every page. The Campaigns list, under Waiting for you, and each campaign’s page say how many decisions wait in each run, such as 2 decisions wait for you, with a Review button. It opens the run’s page, whose Overview tab lists that run’s decisions under Needs you. A change’s own page has a Your decision box.

Decide

1. Open a row. It says what is asked, why it waits, and where: the campaign, run, rig and lane. For a change, What the judge found has the judge’s evidence and Problems that the agent wrote lists flaws the agent declared.

2. Read what each choice does, then press its button.

   The row says You selected … and Control sent it to the rig. The rig does it in less than 10 seconds.

3. Press refresh in the status bar. Once the rig has done it, the row says what happened and This item goes away after the next report from the rig, in about one minute. If the rig refused, the row gives the cause, and the buttons come back.

What each decision asks

Label	The question	It appears when	Buttons
Your decision	Make this change the new champion?	The run promotes only with your approval, an audit holds the change, or the auditor sent it to you	Make it the champion, Reject it
Blocked	Overrule the auditor and make this change the champion?	The rig’s auditor blocked the change	Overrule the auditor, Reject it
Review	Accept the goal ”…” as met?	The rig’s review panel passed a subjective goal	Accept, Reject
Not possible?	End this campaign as not possible?	The harness, the rig’s container that holds the judge, proposes that a goal campaign’s goals can’t be reached	End it: not possible, Keep going
New key	Accept this rig’s new report key?	A rig reports with a key control has not pinned	Accept this key
Wipe	Wipe this rig’s state?	A full reset you started is ready for its last step	Confirm the wipe, Cancel the reset
Not reporting	This rig stopped reporting, or, for a rig that never reported, This rig has not reported yet	A rig has sent no report for a while. A new rig whose first key waits for you shows under New key instead	Open the rig

Promotions

When the judge confirms that a change is better, the run’s rule decides what happens:

• always keep it (auto): it becomes the champion at once, unless an audit holds it.
• ask me every time (owner_approval): it waits for you as Your decision.
• the rig’s default: the rule on the rig’s Edit rig page, under 3 · When a change becomes the champion: Automatically unless changed, or Ask me for each change.

You choose a run’s rule with When a change is confirmed better, on the New campaign page or under More options in a campaign’s Start a run panel, or with --promotion on thermite assign. The run’s Overview tab shows the rule in force, in the block The run, as Promotion: Automatic when the judge confirms; audits and big gains still wait for you, Only with your approval, or The rig's default (set where the rig is deployed).

Make it the champion makes the change the next champion: agents start their next work from it. If the champion changed while the change waited, the judge first tests it again against the new champion. If the agent declared flaws, approving accepts them, and the record shows your name. Reject it keeps the change from becoming the champion, and the record shows that you rejected it.

Audits

An audit holds a confirmed change before it becomes the champion when:

• the agent declared flaws in it;
• in a hill climb, its gain is above the contract’s acceptance.audit.absolute (0.15, that is 15%), or above acceptance.audit.ratio_to_median (3) times the median of the run’s earlier wins, once it has three;
• in a goal campaign, the contract has an adversarial_checklist: then every change is audited.

The rig’s auditor, one of its advisors, answers each audit: it clears the change, blocks it, or sends it to you. Who decides then:

Why the change is audited	The auditor clears it	The auditor blocks it
The agent declared flaws	It waits for you	Blocked: you may overrule
A gain above absolute	It waits for you	Blocked: you may overrule
A gain above ratio_to_median times the median	It becomes the champion, or waits for you if the run asks you every time	Blocked: you may overrule
A goal campaign’s adversarial_checklist	The same	Blocked: you may overrule

The row says either The auditor of this rig will make the decision if you do not. or This rig has no auditor, thus you must make the decision.

Make it the champion decides in place of the auditor. Overrule the auditor, on a Blocked row, makes a blocked change the champion anyway.

Reviews

A goal checked by review counts as met only with your word. It reaches you only after the rig’s review panel passes it. A panel chosen on Edit rig is three reviewers with the same model; one in the rig’s advisors file has two to five. A rig with no review panel leaves such goals unmet.

A switch that is on is not an advisor

On Edit rig, the Auditor, Teacher pair and Review panel switches are on by default, also on a rig that has no such advisor. A switch only lets an advisor work once it has a model. The rig’s page shows what it has: its Advisors row says none configured when it has none. See Configure advisors.

Accept makes the goal met; the judge then checks the champion’s goals again, and if every required goal is met, the campaign completes. Reject keeps the goal unmet.

“Not possible” endings

The harness proposes ending a goal campaign as not possible only when its contract allows it (infeasibility.allowed), and once min_refuted_approaches approaches have each had at least three changes judged with no progress. Campaigns made on the New campaign page don’t allow it. No agent can end a campaign.

End it: not possible closes the run: its agents stop, and nothing more is judged. Keep going dismisses the proposal. A later proposal needs a newly refuted approach.

Keys, resets and silent rigs

• New key: work out the rig’s own fingerprint on the rig, as Accept a rig’s key shows: the first 16 hexadecimal characters of the SHA-256 of its public key. Nothing prints it when a rig is set up. If it matches the one on the row, press Accept this key. Until you do, control refuses the rig’s reports.
• Wipe: check that the export it names is in the results repository, then press Confirm the wipe, which deletes the rig’s ledger, builds and workspaces for good. Cancel the reset wipes nothing; the rig stays paused until you resume its run. Only a rig with a results repository can be fully reset, and rigs that control sets up have none yet (goal 061). See Stop, restart, remove and fully reset a rig.
• Not reporting: Open the rig shows its last known state and what you can do.

Decide without the dashboard

All of these take the owner’s token. The examples use the owner’s token file of the local stack, .dev/secrets/control-admin-token. If you made an owner’s token of your own, use its file instead.

Decision	REST API	MCP
Make a change the champion, or reject it	POST /v1/commands, kind approve_promotion or decline_promotion, payload {"run": …, "attempt": …}	issue_command, with the owner’s token
Accept or reject a review	kind accept_review, payload {"run": …, "review": <n>, "accept": true}	no
End a campaign as not possible, or keep going	kind conclude, payload {"run": …, "proposal": <n>, "accept": true}	no
Accept a rig’s key	POST /v1/rigs/<rig>/key/accept?fingerprint=<fingerprint>	no

The review and proposal numbers are on the run, in GET /v1/rigs/<rig>/view or the MCP tool get_run: each item of its reviews has a review, and each item of its conclusions a proposal. An attempt’s id shows at the top of its page on the dashboard, after attempt, such as a-0123456789abcdef.

thermite command sends the same kinds. Run npx thermite in your Thermite folder, after npm ci and npm run build (see the command line):

npx thermite command --control http://127.0.0.1:8800 --token-file .dev/secrets/control-admin-token \
  --rig local-1 --kind approve_promotion --payload '{"run":"sort-speed-1","attempt":"a-0123456789abcdef"}'

The operator’s and agent’s MCP tokens can’t issue any of these kinds.