# PDR 005: Delegate bounded recipe work while keeping publication human

- HTML version: https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/recipe-site/pdrs/005-delegated-agent-access-with-human-publishing
- Project: Recipe Site
- Status: Proposed
- Opened: 2026-07-25

## Context

An agent can answer useful questions from a person's recipes, pantry, diet,
and cooking history. It can also reconcile pantry items, record a cook, or
prepare an imported recipe. Giving the agent a browser session or a broad API
key would hide which agent acted and make one credential cover unrelated work.

Delegated access also changes the recovery burden. A mistaken read reveals
private data. A mistaken write may alter a household's current state. A recipe
publication, deletion, or membership change can affect other people and may be
hard to reverse.

## Proposed decision

Let a user approve a named agent for a narrow set of task-oriented capabilities.
The approval shows the agent and host, target account or household, allowed
actions, limits, and expiry. A grant can reduce the user's existing permission,
but it cannot expand it. Removing household access also removes the agent's
derived access.

Allow bounded recipe, pantry, shopping-list, and cooking-history reads without
a prompt on every call after the user approves the grant. Separate read grants
from writes and cost-incurring imports. Pantry and cooking-log writes must be
attributable, idempotent, grouped into a reviewable change set, and reversible
without erasing their history.

An agent may submit and monitor an import and suggest draft corrections. A
person must still review and publish the draft under PDR 004. Do not delegate
recipe deletion, bulk export, household membership, visibility changes, quota
changes, raw private evaluation data, or secret and administrative operations
in the initial capability set.

Users can inspect and revoke one agent without ending their own sessions or
another agent's grant. The product records approval, execution, failure,
expiry, and revocation without logging private recipe or pantry payloads.

## Consequences

Agents can help with repeated kitchen work without becoming indistinguishable
from the person who delegated it. The service gains approval, revocation,
attribution, undo, and capability-management interfaces before it can expose
private state safely.

Some useful actions remain human-only even when an agent can prepare all of
their inputs. That limit protects household governance and the publication
boundary at the cost of an extra handoff.

## Evaluation

Accept this proposal only after a user can identify an agent, approve exact
capabilities, observe attributed activity, reverse supported writes, and revoke
the grant promptly. Tests must prove that an agent cannot use a grant after the
user loses the underlying resource permission and cannot publish an imported
draft.

## Migration note

This record extracts the product delegation policy from proposed ADR 019. It
keeps the original date, Proposed status, capability boundary, and human-only
publication rule. The migration does not approve the Agent Auth protocol or
broaden the proposed agent permissions.

## Related records

- Project: [Recipe Site](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/recipe-site.md)
- Implemented by ADR: [ADR 019: Agent Auth for Delegated Recipe Access](https://robbiepalmer.me/projects/recipe-site/adrs/019-agent-auth.md)

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