Approvals & Memory

Understand Starfire AI approval gates, human oversight, persistent memory, and automation boundaries.

Approvals & memory

Approvals and memory solve two different problems in Starfire automation:

• Approvals decide whether a workflow may cross a sensitive boundary.
• Memory lets useful context persist beyond one execution.

Keeping those concepts separate is important. Remembering a preference does not authorize an action.

Approval gates

A workflow can pause before a sensitive step and wait for an authorized person to approve or reject it.

Examples of actions that may warrant approval include:

• publishing or deploying output
• changing important account or organization configuration
• spending beyond a configured budget
• destructive file operations
• acting through a connected external service
• other actions defined as sensitive by the workflow or organization

A useful approval record can include:

Requested action
Requester / workflow
Target resource
Reason
Expected impact
Approver
Decision
Timestamp

Approval outcomes

An approval gate should have explicit outcomes such as approved, rejected, expired, or cancelled. A workflow should not silently treat a missing response as approval.

Memory

Memory is persistent context that can help Starfire avoid relearning stable information every time.

Potential memory scopes include:

• personal
• project
• organization
• agent-specific

Scope matters because information useful in one context may be inappropriate or misleading in another.

Memory vs Knowledge

Memory is compact persistent context about preferences, decisions, or ongoing state.

Knowledge is a larger retrieval system for documents, repositories, and indexed source material.

They can work together but are not interchangeable.

Memory vs permissions

A stored memory cannot grant itself access. Runtime authorization still comes from account, organization, project, integration, and administrator policy.

Never use persistent memory as a place to store passwords, API secrets, private keys, or other credentials. Secrets belong in the platform’s dedicated credential/integration systems.

Status

Approval and memory foundations are part of the NEXUS-era backend expansion. Individual UI surfaces and workflow integrations can be staged separately during Alpha rollout.