Escalation and Ambiguity¶
When to stop and ask a human¶
- Irreversible actions — anything that cannot be easily undone (deleting authoritative history, an action with real-world effect outside version control).
- Missing required human-only approval — the task requires moving into
approvedstatus, or otherwise finalizing something in the high-risk list in task-classification-and-routing.md, and no human approval exists yet. - Genuinely ambiguous requirements with material downstream cost — where guessing wrong would be expensive to unwind, and the ambiguity cannot be resolved from existing authoritative documents.
- Contradictions between authoritative documents that sit at the same precedence tier (see source-of-truth-rules.md) and cannot be resolved by the precedence order alone.
When to proceed with a documented assumption instead¶
For everything else — minor ambiguity, low-cost-to-reverse decisions, gaps that a reasonable working assumption can bridge without materially affecting downstream work — proceed, but document the assumption:
- Add an entry to docs/governance/assumptions-register.md (ID, assumption, made by, date, status, notes) if it is a company-level assumption with standing relevance.
- For a task-local assumption that doesn't warrant a permanent register entry, note it in the work plan's "Assumptions" section (see planning-and-work-logs.md) and in the handoff (see change-and-handoff-protocol.md).
The underlying principle¶
Asking too often on genuinely low-stakes questions slows everything down; guessing silently on genuinely high-stakes questions creates hidden risk. The line is cost of being wrong times difficulty of reversing it. When that product is high, ask. When it's low, document the assumption and move on.