FAQ & Troubleshooting
Quick answers to the questions operators and sponsors ask most.
Why can’t I approve this item?
Approve stays locked until the checker has recorded a passing check. This is enforced by the server, not just hidden in the page — you cannot approve an item that has no passing check on record. You can still reject the item or send it back for more work; only the Approve action is gated. Once a passing check exists, Approve becomes available. See Approving with Evidence.
Why can’t an agent approve for me?
Only a human can grant an approval. When an agent agrees with a proposal, that is agreement — confirmation that the work looks sound — but it is not permission to proceed (rule G-004). The decision to approve has to come from a person. See Autonomous Orchestration.
Why won’t my project advance to the next phase?
A project moves to the next phase only after the current phase’s gate has been signed off, and only the sponsor can sign a phase gate. If the project seems stuck at a phase boundary, the gate is most likely still waiting on the sponsor’s sign-off. See Phase Gates.
Who can close a project?
Only the sponsor of an open project can close it. Once a project is closed it becomes read-only, so its record is preserved as it stood at closing. See Managing Projects.
I didn’t get, or can’t act on, an email approval.
By default approval emails are notify-only: they carry a login link, not the decision itself. To act, sign in and make the decision in the app.
For email replies to drive a decision, several conditions must all hold: the item must be in full mode; your reply must include an explicit DECISION line and a RATIONALE; and the item must not have changed since the notice went out (a Content-Hash check guards against this). Inbound replies must also pass the sender-allowlist and anti-spoofing guards. If any of those fail, the reply is not acted on — sign in to decide instead. See Email Approvals.
How do I get the data out?
You can export the data as CSV or JSON, and you can review the full audit trail of changes. See Export and Audit.
The dashboard page won’t load, or the service seems stuck.
First confirm the service is running and listening on its configured port (default 8088). If it needs a restart, remember that a full restart means stopping the Python process bound to that port, not just stopping the scheduled task — a detached process can keep serving stale code on the port. See Running the AIPM Service.
I edited a help page but the public site didn’t change.
The public documentation site is published by a separate TAR-and-upload step. Source edits to these help files do not go live until that publish step runs, so the public site can lag behind the source until then.
I can’t log in.
Passwords are provisioned by an administrator — there is no self-registration. A user who has no password set cannot log in. If you are locked out, ask an administrator to set a password for your identity.