---
title: "Capability checklist"
description: "Memory, context, decisions, the agent fleet, approvals, governance and integration, as one checklist."
url: "https://docs.octo.ad/reference/capability-checklist/"
id: "reference/capability-checklist"
type: "reference"
audience: "operator"
dateModified: "2026-11-06"
keywords: ["capabilities", "checklist"]
---

# Capability checklist

> Memory, context, decisions, the agent fleet, approvals, governance and integration, as one checklist.

### Memory

- [ ] Typed, linked knowledge graph as the organization's system of record
- [ ] Persists across every session, agent and team; compounds instead of disappearing into chat logs
- [ ] Entities typed, classified, reconciled and de-duplicated across sources, aligned to standard public vocabularies
- [ ] New entities and promoted signals confirmed by a person before anything durable is written
- [ ] Meetings, calls and threads distilled into decisions, action items, topics and expertise

### Context

- [ ] Context assembled per task and checked against an explicit schema before it reaches a model
- [ ] Retrieval keeps relationships between facts instead of flattening them into text chunks
- [ ] Related facts pulled across every domain in one pass

### Decisions

- [ ] Proposals, options and verdicts recorded as auditable structure
- [ ] Every decision recorded, attributed and replayable
- [ ] Consequential decisions routed to a person for approval, on the record
- [ ] Every output tied to the sources and reasoning that produced it

### Agent fleet

- [ ] Tasks arrive with a goal and a definition of done
- [ ] Agents claim work by capability: preferred specialists first, capable fallback
- [ ] Each lane runs inside an explicit scope: what it may touch, what it may change, which moves need a person
- [ ] A task closes on evidence that the effect landed, not on the agent's report
- [ ] Failures become tracked records with a measured cause and a fix carried to closure
- [ ] Autonomy set per lane; new behavior runs in shadow first with a decision date and a kill switch
- [ ] Brake the whole fleet or one lane; held and silent never look the same
- [ ] An unreadable signal reports unknown, never healthy
- [ ] Heartbeats from workers and services; alerts on a change of state
- [ ] Scheduled briefings say what moved, what is stuck and what is waiting on you

### Approvals (the Desk)

- [ ] Phone-first: one card per decision, question and recommendation first, options side by side, evidence attached
- [ ] A card that depends on missing context or undefined terms is refused before it reaches a person
- [ ] Reply by voice; the agent that owns the work picks up the reply in the same thread
- [ ] Reversible actions run at once with a short undo window; irreversible ones need a deliberate confirmation
- [ ] Every decision recorded with who made it, when and what they chose

### Governance and trust

- [ ] Coherence check on consequential actions before they execute
- [ ] Schema contracts enforced before data lands
- [ ] Complete, queryable, tamper-evident audit record
- [ ] Provenance: how knowledge entered, who created it, what it supports
- [ ] Tenant isolation by architecture; credentials cannot cross tenants
- [ ] Pre-publish gate blocks content drawing on embargoed or pre-filing material
- [ ] Grounding guards: look up before you make up; verify the effect

### Integration

- [ ] MCP endpoint for AI clients and agents
- [ ] Open APIs over knowledge, context, signals and content
- [ ] Connectors for enterprise tools, data sources and conversation surfaces
- [ ] External-model counsel: a governed, redaction-checked, IP-gated second-opinion lane
- [ ] Cross-organization federation without collapsing tenant boundaries
- [ ] All connections authenticated and tenant-scoped
- [ ] Public concierge for research: MCP tool ask_octopus at https://octo.ad/mcp, or POST https://octo.ad/api/ask