Steward queue guide

A Steward is the human accountable for an agent seat. The Steward queue is where unresolved agent questions, approval requests, and boundary decisions land.

What belongs in the queue

• Agent go-live approvals.
• Tool and permission manifest approvals.
• Must-escalate Charter conditions.
• Ambiguous customer, money, legal, or authority calls.
• Repeated dry-run failures.
• Charter revision recommendations.

How to review an escalation

Read the seat, Charter, evidence, and recommended action. Decide the narrow question first. If the same escalation repeats, revise the Charter rather than answering the same question forever.

In the app, the evidence is shown as a legible card, not raw data: a proposed tool call lists the tool and its summarized arguments, and any attached context shows as labeled fields. Values that read like credentials are redacted, so you can decide without seeing secret material.

Work the queue from CLI or MCP

The Steward reads the queue from any surface but decides as a human.

• Read: rost escalation list --json / escalation.list / rost_list_escalations (own steward chain for humans, own seat for agents). Read one with rost escalation get / escalation.get / rost_get_escalation — evidence, recommendation, and decision state.
• Decide: rost escalation resolve / escalation.resolve and rost escalation reject / escalation.reject. escalation.resolve and escalation.reject are none at the confirmation layer, but they are deliberately NOT exposed over MCP — decisions.decided_by must be a human, so there is no rost_resolve_escalation tool. They are kept human-only by that MCP exclusion plus the human-only decided_by, not by a confirmation gate. The CLI runs them as the authenticated human; an agent session must hand the decision to a person.
• Approve gated requests: when an escalation or Charter change produces a pending confirmation, the human approves with confirmation.approve (or rejects with confirmation.reject). Go-live runs through agent.go_live.

When to stop for confirmation

Every steward decision is the human gate itself. An agent never calls resolve, reject, approve, or go-live on a human's behalf. It prepares evidence and a recommended action and stops. See the confirmations guide.

Good Steward habits

Keep agent scope tight at first. Approve more autonomy only after evidence. Use escalations to improve the system: clarify a responsibility, add a measurable, remove a tool, or split a seat.