Every few months an ad platform's automation cheerfully spends someone's monthly budget in a weekend, and the story makes the rounds. The lesson we take from those stories isn't that ad automation is bad — it's that the spend decision is the one part that should never be automated. So we drew the line exactly there.
What the Ads team does
The Ads team handles everything up to the money:
- Campaign planning — objectives, structure, channel split, budget recommendation with its reasoning shown.
- Audience profiling — who the product is for, translated into the targeting the ad platform understands.
- Creative drafts — headlines, copy variants, and visuals drawn from your actual build, not stock-photo hand-waving.
- Staging — campaigns are prepared in paused state in the ad platform, complete and inspectable.
Then it stops. The activation click, the budget, the card on file — yours. The campaign sits paused until you look it over and decide it deserves money.
Why a hard line beats a smart limit
We could have shipped "autonomous with a spending cap." We didn't, because caps move, defaults drift, and a platform that touches your money at all has to be trusted about every edge case forever. A platform that cannot spend needs no trust — the property is structural. The same rule covers posting under your name: the two things agents never do alone are spend your money and speak as you. It's one sentence of policy, and it's load-bearing across the whole platform.
Where it fits in the loop
Ads close a loop of their own. The Discovery team can stage a paused campaign against a waitlist page to test demand before anything gets built — a dud idea costs a landing page, not a product. Post-launch, campaign performance flows into the same scorekeeping as search and store data, and the next planning run reads it.