# Progressive Delegation

> Start with drafts the human always reviews; expand the agent's autonomy action-by-action as measured trust accrues — promotion and demotion are automatic, evidence-based.

- **Category**: Agentic AI
- **Subcategory**: Multi-Agent
- **Canonical URL**: https://designpattern.fyi/patterns/progressive_delegation/

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## Description
**Intent**: Stage the human-to-agent handoff over time — the agent starts producing drafts a human always reviews; its autonomy expands action-by-action as measured trust accrues.
**Context**: An agent will eventually take over parts of a human workflow — drafting code review comments, triaging support tickets, scheduling meetings. The end state is full autonomy on routine cases; the starting state is human-supervised because trust hasn't been built yet.
**Solution**: Tag each action class with a current autonomy level (draft → assisted-send → autonomous). For each class, track a rolling success-rate window. Promotion fires automatically when the window clears a bar over enough samples; demotion fires when it drops below. The promotion mechanism is the policy of record — not a verbal decision in standup.



## Use Cases
- Multiple action classes have materially different risk profiles.
- Per-class success can be measured online with reasonable delay.
- Stakeholders want autonomy to be a measurement outcome, not a meeting decision.






## Trade-offs


### Advantages

- Autonomy decisions become a function of evidence rather than calendar or politics.

- Different action classes can sit at genuinely different autonomy levels simultaneously.

- Trust incidents demote only the affected action class, not the whole agent.




### Considerations & Drawbacks

- Promotion gates can be cheaply gamed if the success metric is weak or easily satisfied.

- Demotion thrashing on small windows can noisily yank capabilities away.

- Per-class bookkeeping is overhead that small teams consistently underinvest in.







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**Reference**: [Original Source](https://www.agentpatternscatalog.org/patterns/progressive-delegation/)