At some point the approval card for a bot reading its own folder stops telling you anything, and for most people that is around the tenth press of Allow once. A bot that asks you about every file it reads is doing what you told it to, and so is a bot that sends to nobody and asks about nothing, which is the one most people quietly switch off after a week because supervising it got tiring.
We call it graduated trust, and it works roughly the way a new hire's first month does: a kind of work comes back right a few times, you stop checking that kind of work, and you start checking it again the moment something comes back wrong.
The mechanics are 4 levels, Ask, Auto, Full access and No limits (the stop line page has them), and the 5 or so buttons on every card.
Week one: Ask, and press the buttons
Every new bot starts on Ask. Leave it there. For the first week you'll see a card for each action that needs permission, and the job is to notice which cards are boring.
Allow once when you're not sure yet. Allow for this task on a stop-line card when a job needs several similar steps, replying to five people in one thread, say. Always allow only for something you'd approve every time, and read the card before you press it, because on an ordinary connected-app card it covers the whole tool. On a stop-line card it's tied to that folder, recipient or payee, which is the narrow version you want. Deny means no, and a no is final: the default House Rules say the bot won't reach the same result by another route.
Every Always allow you grant is listed in Bot settings > Permissions > Always allowed, with Remove next to it. Look at that list at the end of week one. If something's on it that you don't remember granting, take it off.
Week two: Auto for the boring ones
Raise the level when the cards you're approving are boring. If you've approved the same kind of card 10 times without changing anything, the bot is ready for Auto. On Auto it keeps going, and destructive or sensitive actions still ask. The bot that reads and sorts mail is the obvious first move, since reading and labeling is low risk. The bot that drafts replies can follow, with "drafts, not sends" in its House Rules.
Lower it again the moment a card surprises you. Nothing has gone wrong when that happens; the card did its job.
Later: Full access for bots in their own folder
Full access suits bots that take a lot of steps in their own space: research, drafting, analyzing files, building. It doesn't ask, except at the stop line and before reading the keys and sign-ins you've given Murage, so a research bot can read 40 pages without 40 cards, and the stop line still catches the moment it tries to message anyone new, post publicly, pay, or delete outside its folder. The steps it took fold into one Approved N steps line in the chat, so you can still see what it did.
Two things we'd keep on Ask whatever the week. Anything that moves money: paying stops at the stop line on every level but No limits, and we'd add a House Rule on top that says "Never pay, transfer, refund or approve an invoice." And any bot where one mistake would really hurt. The stop line is a check on each action and nothing more.
No limits we'd avoid without a specific reason. It turns the stop line off, it's desktop only, and you confirm a warning to switch it on.
Routines have their own level. A routine runs at its own approval level, set under Advanced > Approvals for this routine, and one you haven't set follows its bot's. Keep a new routine on Ask or Auto and design it to produce a draft or a report rather than a send. Once it has run cleanly for a few weeks, Always allow for this routine stops it asking about the same command or place again, for that routine only. The same bot in an ordinary conversation still asks.
On Hermes and other ACP engines, Ask and the stop line cover what the engine asks Murage about. Hermes asks about every tool except reads, searches and its own memory, so a send through a connected-app tool reaches the stop line there too.
The approvals playbook has starting setups for inbox, sales, finance and research teams, and we'd start from those rather than from scratch. Everything on Ask for a week, and count the boring cards. Download Murage and start the week.