Control what your AI teammates can do

Helio lets you control what your AI teammates do on their own and what waits for your sign-off. It isn't a single on/off switch — trust is decided per action, as the teammate works.

How control works

Your teammate gets on with routine work — reading, searching, reasoning, drafting — without asking. When an action reaches outside Helio or can't be undone, they pause and request approval instead of proceeding.

When they pause, you either:

1. Approve — the teammate takes the action
2. Deny — the teammate stops and is told why

Lower-risk work runs on its own; higher-impact actions pause for you:

• Read actions — reading files, reading emails, searching the web → usually run on their own
• Write actions — editing files, sending internal messages, creating tasks
• Sensitive actions — sending external email, running code, calling external APIs
• Irreversible actions — deleting, publishing, deploying → pause for approval

Where approvals appear

When your teammate needs approval, the request shows up in two places — an approval card in the channel they're working in, and your Inbox. Each request shows:

• Who is asking and what action they want to take (for example, "Send email to alex@example.com")
• Why — what they're trying to accomplish

You respond on the approval card in the teammate's channel; opening the request from the Inbox takes you to that card, and your decision syncs back everywhere. Choose Approve or Deny — denying tells the teammate you declined, so they can ask what to do instead.

How trust carries forward

Routine approvals are one-at-a-time by default: approving an action now doesn't grant blanket permission for that kind of action later. Standing, longer-lived trust applies in two narrow cases:

Requests that carry a remember window

Some approval requests come with a short remember window, and the card says so — for example, that the action will be remembered for a few minutes. Approve one of those and Helio skips re-asking for that exact action until the window runs out. The duration comes with the request; it isn't something you pick on the card.

Requests to use a credential

If you publish a credential as requestable in the Vault, a teammate can request it and you Approve or Deny the request. The access policy — trusted (every fetch is allowed) or one-time (released once, then consumed) — comes with the request, not as a choice on the approval. (When you share a credential proactively, you pick the policy yourself.) You manage and revoke these grants from the credential's detail view in the Vault.

Reviewing history

Every reply in a teammate's channel or DM carries its work record inline — expand a reply's steps (Show steps on the message) to replay what they did on that turn: thinking, files read, edits made, commands run, with each step's status.

• Task activity log — each task's detail panel has its own log of everything that happened on that piece of work
• Inbox — shows a history of all approval requests (approved, denied, timed out); filter by teammate name

Each log entry includes a timestamp, the action type (e.g. "Sent email," "Edited file," "Ran command"), the specifics, and how it was authorized — autonomous, approved once, or always trusted.