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Docs/Core concepts/Owners & autonomy
// CORE CONCEPTS

Owners & autonomy

Every ticket has an owner— the one doing the work. Almost always that's Leroy, but it can be you. And for the tickets Leroy owns, a level of autonomy decides how far it gets on its own before it needs you. Owner is who's doing the work; autonomy is how much rope Leroy has.

01 Owners

A ticket is owned either by Leroy or by a human:

Owner
What it means
Leroy
The agent does the work — triaging, planning, coding, reviewing, and shipping the PR. This is most tickets.
You
A person handles it. File it as manual work or assign it to a teammate; Leroy stays out and just tracks it — you move it through its statuses by hand, like any task tracker.

Most of the time Leroy is the owner — that's the point of it. Human ownership is simply there when a piece of work is yours to do: a change you'd rather make yourself, or something you want tracked alongside everything else without handing it to the agent.

02 Handing work to Leroy

Owning a ticket yourself isn't a dead end. When you create work, you choose where it goes:

Send it to…
What happens
Leroy
Leroy owns it and starts now — triages, plans, and ships, pausing at whatever gates you've set.
Leroy · later
Leroy owns it but doesn't start yet. It waits in the backlog until you dispatch it — good for work you want queued, not running.
Manual
You own it. Leroy stays out until you hand it over.
i
A ticket you own can be passed to Leroy whenever you're ready — open it and hit Send to Leroy. It flips to agent-owned and drops into the pipeline from the top, so you can file something for yourself today and let Leroy take it from there tomorrow.

And you don't have to hand over a blank slate. If you've already started — written some code on a branch — Leroy can pick up where you left off instead of starting fresh:

  1. Point the ticket at your branch.Set the ticket's base branch to the one you've been working on (click the branch on the ticket to change it). Leroy will build on your commits, not the repo default.
  2. Leave a handoff note.Comment on the ticket with what's left — remaining to-dos, gotchas, anything Leroy should know. While the ticket is yours, your comments don't wake Leroy — jot as many as you like.
  3. Send it to Leroy. Now it engages: it picks up your branch, reads the full thread — your notes and all — and continues from where you stopped, opening (or extending) the PR on that branch.
i
This direction works; the reverse is coming. Handing your in-progress work to Leroy is built. Taking an in-flight ticket backfrom Leroy mid-run — to finish it yourself — isn't wired up yet.

03 Autonomy

Once Leroy owns a ticket, how far it gets on its own before it needs you is set by your policy gates — three checkpoints (picking up work, starting to code, shipping the PR), each either on Auto or set to always ask. Start from a preset — Cautious, Balanced, or Autonomous — and adjust per source or per repo as you build trust. Two hard stops (a per-task spend cap and risky-path globs) always apply, even on full Autonomous.

i
A pause isn't a handoff. When Leroy stops at a gate to ask for your approval, the ticket is still Leroy's— it's just waiting on you, and shows up in your needs-you queue. You only owna ticket when it's yours to work (manual or assigned to you). Approving a gate sends it straight back to Leroy.

That's the whole model: owner says who's holding the work, autonomy says how closely you're watching Leroy when it's holding it. Read the full Policy gates guide →

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