OpenAI Dots: four roles, five-step chains and hard limits on autonomy
The author splits Dots into four roles, caps chains at five steps, divides permissions into three tiers and keeps approvals under five a day, arguing that autonomy needs hard edges.
openai dots looks simple until you let one agent run your whole week i turned the setup into a tighter system instead of giving one dot unlimited freedom: step 1 → give it 4 seats: LOOKOUT, MAKER, SKEPTIC, RUNNER. one agent, one memory, one role at a time. step 2 → never let a chain run past 5 steps. stop, run a checkpoint, then continue. step 3 → split permissions into allow / ask first / block so uncertainty always moves toward you, not toward action. step 4 → keep approvals under 5 a day. if you’re clicking 40 prompts, the guardrail already failed. step 5 → give every artifact somewhere permanent to land, then keep a simple index of what the agent actually did. the useful shift isn’t “make the agent more autonomous.” it’s giving autonomy hard edges. full OpenAI Dots guide + prompts in the article below ↓
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