There is a sentence on nearly every page of this site: nothing goes out before you approve it. It reads like a safety disclaimer. It is actually the load-bearing design decision of the whole product, and it deserves a fuller argument than a footnote.
An agent that signs with your name
A marketing agent does not publish under its own name. It publishes under yours - your face on the LinkedIn post, your company behind the claim, your reputation absorbing whatever lands wrong. Handing that signature to software is not a productivity decision. It is a trust decision, and trust is not something a product gets to demand in week one.
So we made the rule structural instead of optional. Approval is not a setting you can relax or a mode you graduate out of. It is the only path to publishing that exists in Raldo. There is no toggle we could flip under pressure, no “autopilot” tier waiting on a higher plan. A rule with an exception is a rule you have to keep checking.
Autonomy belongs in the middle
This is not caution about agents doing real work. Raldo plans a week of posts unprompted, drafts every one of them off your brand layer, checks its own claims against your sources, lays out the visuals on a real canvas, and reads your numbers back to you on Friday. The middle of the work is where autonomy pays, so that is where we spent it.
The end of the work is different in kind. Publishing is the one step that cannot be unpublished - a wrong draft costs a correction, a wrong post costs credibility. Putting a human decision on exactly that step is not a limitation of the agent. It is the agent knowing which step is which.
The approval makes the work better
There is a quieter benefit. Because every draft passes through you, every draft is a lesson: what you approve untouched, what you always rephrase, what you kill on sight. Those corrections flow back into the brand layer, so the drafts drift toward needing less of you. The approvals get faster. The rule never does.
What it costs you
One coffee, most weeks. The plan arrives, the drafts sit side by side, and saying yes to a good week takes minutes because the checking happened before you arrived. That is the trade as we see it: minutes of your judgement, spent at the one step where judgement is the whole job.
Your audience trusts what goes out under your name because you do. We would rather build on that than around it.