The skill that turns a pile of agents into a governed income swarm. Three tiers — founder · queens · workers — and one load-bearing escalation contract that guarantees the same thing at every level: no autonomous money movement, ever.
This is the substrate-level, brand-neutral version. Wire it to whatever orchestrator, worker harness, and shared memory your operator owns.
Topology: queen-led per stream, mesh within a stream
┌──────────────────────────┐
│ FOUNDER AGENT │
│ sets thesis · approves │
│ capital · owns │
│ irreversible · resolves │
│ conflicts between queens │
└────────────┬─────────────┘
│ escalation contract
┌──────────────┬──────────┴──────┬──────────────┐
▼ ▼ ▼ ▼
┌─────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐
│ STREAM │ │ STREAM │ │ STREAM │ │ PAYMENTS │
│ QUEEN A │ │ QUEEN B │ │ QUEEN C │ │ QUEEN │
└────┬────┘ └────┬─────┘ └────┬─────┘ └────┬─────┘
│ mesh │ │ │
┌────┴────┐ ┌────┴────┐ ┌────┴────┐ ┌─────┴────┐
│ workers │ │ workers │ │ workers │ │ workers │
└─────────┘ └─────────┘ └─────────┘ └──────────┘
Each queen runs a hierarchical swarm of workers; workers collaborate peer-to-peer inside their stream (mesh). Queens do not command across streams — they coordinate only through the founder.
Tier 1 — The founder agent
Owns:
- The thesis — which streams exist, what the gate ladder is.
- All capital allocation and any irreversible action (new payment rail, vendor contract, spend above cap, structural change).
- Conflict resolution between queens.
Never does the per-stream work. The founder sets direction and holds the gate; queens execute.
Tier 2 — Stream queens
Each queen is scoped to one income stream, runs a self-improving loop on a cadence, and escalates per the contract. A queen may act autonomously within its scope and below its caps. It must escalate the moment an action crosses a stream boundary, exceeds a cap, or becomes irreversible.
Typical queens: one per income stream (e.g. affiliate, products, content) plus a payments queen
that owns authorization + settlement gating (see payments-mandate).
Tier 3 — Workers
A worker does exactly one job, reports progress through shared memory, and never moves money or publishes without its queen's gate. Workers are stateless between tasks — all state lives in the shared vault. Workers never call payment tools directly; they report a finding, the queen runs the tool.
The escalation contract (the safety spine)
No autonomous money movement. Ever.
| Action class | Who decides | Gate required |
|---|---|---|
| Worker task within stream (draft, audit, research) | Worker → Queen | Queen review |
| Bind a link, schedule a post, build a page | Queen | brand / claims gate |
| Any payment / settlement | Payments Queen | mandate verified + spend-cap check + audit entry (verify-only tools, fail-closed) + human gate |
| Spend above cap, new rail, new vendor | Founder | pressure-test + human approval |
| Irreversible (delete, rename live URL, rotate key, send blast, move funds) | Founder | human approval, always |
The standing rule: agents draft, gate, and commit; humans deploy, post, send, and approve capital. Money and irreversibility are never delegated to autonomy.
The escalation path
worker ──finding──► queen ──within scope & cap? act : escalate──► founder ──capital/irreversible?──► human
Each hop is a narrowing of authority. A worker cannot reach the founder directly — it goes through its queen. A queen cannot move capital — it goes through the founder. The founder cannot do the irreversible thing alone — it goes through the human. Skipping a hop is the failure this contract prevents.
How to configure each role
Founder : orchestrator seat + governance/board gate + thesis + full tool stack
(shared vault rw · payments verify-only · approvals channel)
Queen : coordinator scoped to one stream + that stream's skills
(e.g. affiliate → agentic-income + affiliate-audit; payments → payments-mandate)
+ shared vault (rw within stream) + payments tools (verify-only) + escalation channel
Worker : worker harness + one skill + shared vault (append-only) — no payment tools
Compose
payments-mandate— the money gate the payments queen runs; the rest of the contract routes every settlement here.agentic-income— the operating brain a non-payment stream queen runs as its self-improving loop.affiliate-audit— the weekly loop engine for an affiliate stream queen.
How SIS consumes this
The Starlight Intelligence System maps the founder seat to its orchestrator (pressure-tested by its governance board), the queens to per-stream coordinators, and the workers to its worker harness. The escalation contract is enforced by the system's safety layer; outputs are SIP-attested and the no-autonomous-money-movement + human-gate invariants are non-waivable.
Built on SIP — Starlight Intelligence Protocol Substrate: starlightintelligence.org/protocol v1.1.0 Layers used: [file-contract, attestation, sovereignty] Vertical: starlight-agent-skills · portable capability layer