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Queenright

Stable concepts for human–agent collaboration

Concepts and config, not product code.

Why

The landscape moves faster than any product

Platforms for running agent teams are months old and change with every release. Nothing in this space is mature yet.

Buzz

Pre-1.0. The agent runtime is moving into the app with 1.0.

Paperclip

Open source and very popular. Thousands of open issues, releases every few days.

Microsoft Agent 365

Generally available since 2026. Parts of Entra Agent ID are still in preview.

So the question is not which product, but what all of them arrived at independently. That is what will still hold next year.

Vision & mission

Every agent in a team is known, owned, observable and reproducible, from its first key to its last day, whatever runtime it runs on.

A human–agent team must be able to do five things:

See

Who exists, who owns whom, who answers whom.

Compose

An agent is a versioned template plus instance parameters.

Operate

Commission, change and decommission, with approval.

Observe

What actually happens: health, traces, feedback.

Govern

Identity, ownership, access and interaction rules.

↻ What is observed feeds the next version.

The core

Seven concepts every human–agent team needs

Each part of the mission rests on one of them. Govern carries four of the seven, including the one most often missing.

1

Inventory

You can't govern what you can't see. Every person, agent, owner relation and access path, in one place.

2

Own identity

An agent is never a human's account. Its actions are distinguishable and revocable on their own.

3

Accountable human

Every agent has an owner who answers for it. Ownership passes on when they leave; it never lapses.

4

Template vs. instance

The definition is versioned, the instance runs it. Changing an agent means changing its template version.

5

Lifecycle with approval

Commission, change, decommission through steps a human approves. Archive identities, never reassign them.

6

Least privilege

Only what the task needs. Temporary grants are revoked when the task is done.

7

Interaction rules

Who may address whom, which agents answer whom, when a human decides. The concept most often missing.

Across all seven

Every output traces back to an agent, a version and an owner.

Mapping

Same concepts, different names

The concepts are mainstream. Only the names and the point of enforcement differ.

ConceptIn BuzzAt Microsoft
1 InventoryAgent registry, channel member listsAgent 365 registry
2 Own identityNostr key + owner attestation (NIP-OA)Entra Agent ID
3 Accountable humanAttested ownerSponsor, falls back to manager
4 Template vs. instanceAgent definition / kitBlueprint / agent identity
5 Lifecycle with approvalOwner-reviewed agent draftsEntra lifecycle workflows
6 Least privilegeChannel membership + roleAccess packages
7 Interaction rulesRespond-to allowlist, subscription configLargely open: left to the build tool
Access

Access has two sides

Identity and access management looks at what an agent may do. Just as important is who may tell it to.

Inbound

Who may instruct the agent?

  • Owner
  • Project team
  • Agent B (allowlisted)
  • Anyone else in the channel
#7 Interaction rules · often missing
Agent

Outbound

What may the agent do?

  • Read the project repo
  • Open pull requests
  • Customer mailbox
  • Production secrets
#6 Least privilege · where IAM focuses

Effective power = everyone who can reach the agent × everything it may do

Enforcement

An instruction is advice, a gate is enforcement

Whoever can talk to an agent effectively holds its permissions.

Instruction

"Only take orders from your owner." in the prompt
  • Lives inside the model's context
  • Can be ignored, argued, tricked or injected away
  • Fails silently

Gate

Anyone not on the list never reaches the model.
  • Enforced by the harness, not by the model
  • Same rule for every model and harness
  • Visible and reviewable as config
Interaction rules

Why interaction rules matter

1

Permissions follow reachability

Limiting what an agent may access is pointless if the wrong person can instruct it.

2

Agent edges chain

If A may talk to B and B to C, A reaches C. Each edge is an escalation path and a loop risk.

A B C
3

Accountability needs a known trigger

An owner can only answer for actions that someone was allowed to trigger.

4

Agents have no hallway instinct

People don't take orders from strangers. Agents may, unless a gate stops them.

Necessary, not sufficient: content that reaches an agent indirectly (threads, files, web pages) still gets in. Least privilege limits the damage when it does.

Opinionated

Five rules

Where the field is still moving, these are fixed positions, not options.

1

Gate over instruction

A rule counts only if it is enforced before the model sees anything.

2

Inbound counts as much as outbound

Whoever can reach an agent effectively holds its permissions, and reach chains.

3

No agent without an accountable human

Ownership passes on. Identities are archived, never reassigned.

4

Derived data is never typed by hand

If a system already knows it, read it from there. Only intent is declared.

5

Policy is versioned config, reviewed by the owner

Rules, templates, grants and owners live in version control. A prompt is not policy.

Scope

A stable core, a mapping that changes

Queenright owns the top two layers. The bottom layer belongs to the platforms.

Changes in years

Concepts

The seven concepts, plus traceability.

Changes per decision

Policy as config

Respond-to matrix, templates, grants, owners. Versioned, reviewed by the owner.

Changes with every release

Mappings

Platforms (Buzz, Microsoft, Paperclip) · runtimes (host, Docker, Kubernetes) · harnesses (Copilot, Claude, Goose) · models.

A blueprint, not a product

No runtime, no hosting, no dashboard product. Where a platform already does something well, we map to it.

1

Write it down

CONCEPTS.md: one page, one paragraph per concept.

2

Policy as config

The respond-to matrix as versioned config, first.

3

Map it

Buzz first, then Microsoft.

4

Code goes upstream

Fleet view, archiving, lifecycle: offered to the platforms, not rebuilt here.