Standing Mandate
Pre-authorised autonomous action, valid only while every one of a fixed set of conditions holds.
A standing mandate lets an agent act without asking, but only inside a fixed set of conditions — reversible, verified, no external effect, audit-logged, capped per day. It fails closed: if any single condition cannot be shown to hold, the action goes back to asking.
Definition
A pre-authorisation to act without asking, bounded by conditions that must all hold. Not a permission level and not a judgement call — a checklist evaluated before each action.
In practice
The live mandate covers reversible internal fixes and requires all 6 of: a backup and rollback path, a verification step, no external effect, exclusion of anything governance-related, an audit log entry, and semantic neutrality. Cap: 10 actions per day.
It fails closed. If any one condition cannot be demonstrated, the action reverts to asking.
See also
term-executor · the-green-light-nobody-owns
$ head -12 term-standing-mandate.md
$ cite term-standing-mandate
Citation id SV-3582 is stable. It resolves at
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which a bare URL does not survive. The verification date is part of the citation on
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[Standing Mandate](https://stillvalid.dev/start/term-standing-mandate) — stillvalid, SV-3582 (glossary-entry, verified 2026-08-14)