Admin

Sides

The Business's operators, over subjects who never sign in

Unit of work

A record and a named Action with a reason

Examples

• Admin

The five tests

1. who signs in
2. which record dominates
3. who acts next
4. how money moves
5. who may settle what

Carried only by it, from What every App needs

Editing the Definition, Metric definitions included; retire, merge and restore; import mapping; view-as sessions

Screens its Interfaces name, by reader

Every operator

"Needs you" counts · global search and a command palette where Verbs are commands · a list per Noun · saved views, boards and calendars · the Thing page · the Verb dialog

Operator at scale

Bulk change review as a diff · the Changes feed with Undo · retired Things with Restore · field history · import with mapping and matching · export · merge duplicates · a retire dialog counting what else changes

Steward

Schema · field editor · access matrix · "What they get" for a chosen actor · view as a Customer · members and Roles · keys · settings · Policies · Definition history

Owner, compliance

Actions log · the pending feed of Actions in a window · security history · data requests · access review

Steward of numbers

Metric and Goal definitions as records · each edit a Change with its effect on readings shown in the Operating review

Build today: the Site pages around it

• article Template
• facts

8actors6workflows7records

Admin is the App where a Business's own people and agents work over everything the Business keeps. They find any Thing fast, read its history, and act on it through named Verbs with a reason. The parties the Things are about, such as Customers, Contacts and suppliers, never sign in to Admin; they have their own Apps.

Every Business that keeps Things ships one: a law firm's back office, a clinic's front-desk admin, a distributor's order desk, a SaaS company's support console. Without it, every refund, wrong address and duplicate becomes a raw database edit with no trail.

Admin holds no dashboards. Executive and KPI readings belong to the Operating review, and investor, LP and board packs to the disclosure room. Admin edits a Metric's definition and a Goal's target as Changes, and never a Metric's value. The study describes the work; how an App is defined is open, see What every App needs.

• OwnerOne per Business; every Verb, one-way Verbs includedWorkTransfers or closes the Business, sets the payout destination
• Admin, Member, Viewerstartupbuilder.dev's Access levelsWorkTwo-way changes and access; data work outside access; read only
• StewardOwns the Definition: Nouns, fields, access, PoliciesWorkEdits schema and access
• Specialist seatsA narrow slice of VerbsWorkRefund analyst, dispute analyst, access administrator, data migration specialist
• Outside professionalTime-boxed read or narrow writeWorkAn accountant, an auditor, an agency doing a migration
• WatcherA Role in the parent namespaceWorkPauses, redirects or cancels a pending one-way Action inside its window
• Portfolio operatorReaches every Business a Studio holdsWorkFixes across many Businesses
• AgentsFill the Business's RolesWorkAct through Verbs with attribution; a chat agent acts with the asking member's rights

1. 01
   Workflow 1: Onboarding data and team

   1. 1.1Chat creates Nouns from a sentence and seeds Test only.
   2. 1.2Import maps columns, matches existing Things, makes financial or personal new fields private, and skips problem rows without blocking the rest.
   3. 1.3An import into Live that would trigger welcome emails asks first.
2. 02
   Workflow 2: Find, understand, act, verify

   1. 2.1Search by any identifying value, read fields, Changes and Timeline, pick a Verb.
   2. 2.2The dialog shows the stakes: low runs at once, medium waits one business hour, high one business day.
   3. 2.3A pending Action says why; a done two-way Action offers Undo.
3. 03
   Workflow 3: Bulk change

   1. 3.1Up to a threshold, a change applies with an Undo toast.
   2. 3.2Above it, and for any retire, import or merge, it becomes one Change showing every changed cell.
   3. 3.3Things changed since the proposal are skipped and reported.
4. 04
   Workflow 4: Retire, restore, merge

   1. 4.1The retire dialog counts what each link rule clears, cascades or blocks.
   2. 4.2Restore re-links.
   3. 4.3Merge re-points every link and retires the other Thing.
5. 05
   Workflow 5: Incident

   1. 5.1An agent or a person broke many Things.
   2. 5.2Filter Changes by actor and time, revert by query as one reverting Change, then add a rule so it does not recur.
   3. 5.3Sent messages cannot be unsent, so someone tells the affected Customers.
6. 06
   Workflow 6: Change a Metric's definition or move a target

   1. 6.1Both are Changes under the authority envelope: who may move a target is an envelope entry.
   2. 6.2The Change shows which readings, Key Results and watches it affects, and a renamed Event maps every reader.

Thing, as Admin sees it5 states

1. its Noun's own lifecycle
2. plus live
3. retired
4. merged into another
5. restored

Action4 states

1. pending with one reason (queued, running, awaiting a Worker, input, source, Action or time)
2. done
3. failed
4. canceled or refused

Change (a proposed set of writes)5 states

1. open
2. reviewing
3. merged or closed
4. a conflict returns it to review
5. never a silent overwrite

Decision2 states

1. immutable
2. replaced only by a superseding Decision

Member, key, import11 states

1. invited
2. joined
3. removed
4. active
5. rotated
6. revoked
7. mapping
8. preview
9. importing
10. done
11. undone as one set

View-as session5 states

1. requested with a reason
2. active and read-only
3. ended
4. every page it opened is recorded
5. in an entry the subject can read

Custody record2 states

1. held for its owner under an Agreement
2. surrendered on termination or audit

ActorsCopy Anchor Link

Every Action names who did it and for whom: "Susan (by) refunded Order 1042 for Oyelaran (for) via Admin (via) on Refund.requested (on)". A steward works the Definition; an operator works the facts. Keys and connected apps are actors that write Things and never use Admin's screens.

InterfacesCopy Anchor Link

Records and actionsCopy Anchor Link

Admin's subject is every Noun the Business keeps: a law firm's matters and clients, a SaaS company's accounts and Subscriptions. On top it overlays its own states and records.

Actions, not edits. A refund is not "set status to refunded": it moves money, can fail 30 days later and can collide with a dispute.

Admin routes every consequential change through the Noun's own Verb. Each Verb has an input schema, a reason, a stakes class, a consequence preview and an inverse.

Admin adds Verbs of its own:

• retire, restore and merge;
• import and export;
• open and revert a Change;
• approve, pause, redirect and cancel a pending Action;
• grant and revoke access;
• publish a Version, and view as.

TermsCopy Anchor Link

Terms4 quoted from startupbuilder.dev · 6 it lacks · 0 colliding

Term	In startupbuilder.dev	Definition, quoted from startupbuilder.dev or the gap
Action	Action	"An Action is one Verb performed by a Worker on a Thing, recorded with its status and every Event it emits."
Role	Role	"A Role is a seat that owns a set of work and holds the Permissions to do it, filled by a Human or an Agent."
Worker	Worker	"A Worker is a Human or an Agent that fills a Role and acts on Tasks."
Reason code	lacks	startupbuilder.dev records a reason on a refused Action and on a Decision, with no catalog of reasons per Verb.
Timeline	lacks	The story of a Thing, distinct from its audit.
Internal note	lacks	startupbuilder.dev has Messages for parties and nothing for a note on a Thing.
View-as session	lacks	Needs a start, end, scope, reason and record.
Retired	unsettled	Nothing is deleted; the word for a soft-deleted state is open.
Suspend, hold, freeze	lack	A Limit of zero or a lifecycle state is the nearest.
Metric	Metric	"A Metric is a named measure computed from Events or Entries, always derived and never typed in." Admin edits its definition, never its value.
Custody	lacks	Records the Business keeps but does not own, such as an insurer's claim file.

WorkflowsCopy Anchor Link

1. Onboarding data and team. Chat creates Nouns from a sentence and seeds Test only. Import maps columns, matches existing Things, makes financial or personal new fields private, and skips problem rows without blocking the rest. An import into Live that would trigger welcome emails asks first.

2. Find, understand, act, verify. Search by any identifying value, read fields, Changes and Timeline, pick a Verb. The dialog shows the stakes: low runs at once, medium waits one business hour, high one business day. A pending Action says why; a done two-way Action offers Undo.

3. Bulk change. Up to a threshold, a change applies with an Undo toast. Above it, and for any retire, import or merge, it becomes one Change showing every changed cell. Things changed since the proposal are skipped and reported.

4. Retire, restore, merge. The retire dialog counts what each link rule clears, cascades or blocks. Restore re-links. Merge re-points every link and retires the other Thing.

5. Incident. An agent or a person broke many Things. Filter Changes by actor and time, revert by query as one reverting Change, then add a rule so it does not recur. Sent messages cannot be unsent, so someone tells the affected Customers.

6. Change a Metric's definition or move a target. Both are Changes under the authority envelope: who may move a target is an envelope entry. The Change shows which readings, Key Results and watches it affects, and a renamed Event maps every reader.

Admin does not hold the money ledger; it commands money moves on a Thing and shows their state. Refunds follow the refund Policy (always ask, auto-approve up to an amount, never). Changing the payout destination is Owner only.

The operator's Money area (accounts, payment instruments, invoices, payouts) is a composition. Its records are Admin's, its over-Limit approvals the Worklist's, and its runway and spend readings the Operating review's.

BoundariesCopy Anchor Link

• Credentials and secrets never show in clear: key secrets after creation, passwords, tokens, full payment or bank numbers. Tax IDs show masked, to Owner and Admin only.
• A private field is excluded from every serializer: grid, page, diff, export, chat answer, MCP response, view-as.
• In a SaaS Business, a tenant's own Things need the tenant's grant or a recorded reason. Support sees the account, plan, usage and keys by default.
• Privileged and regulated content, such as legal matters and health records, needs confidentiality that an Admin-level member does not pass by default.
• An operator of one Business in a Studio never sees a sibling. Admin rights flow down only.
• Test and Live are an access boundary: separate data over one Definition, and a Test-only member never sees Live.
• View-as is read-only, bannered, recorded and time-boxed, and the subject reads the entry it leaves. A write from it becomes an Action by the operator for the Customer, never by the Customer.
• "Every Noun, no hide" fails by construction for work records. A performer's private block, a worker-held record and a performer's Register are absent from Admin, not withheld.
• Records the Business keeps in custody for another party are a declared custody relation, surrendered on termination or audit.

AgentsCopy Anchor Link

Agents do every read and every two-way write within their Role's Permissions: at once at low stakes, after the window at medium or high. They run imports, dedupe and normalization as Changes, detect duplicates and anomalies, and answer Approvals by Role Policy under code Guards. Evaluators grade and never approve.

A person stays on the legal floor and on ownership acts: transfer, payout destination, closing the Business. A person also answers regulators and courts, and over-Limit Actions where a Policy or the law says so. The design leans on windows and reversal, not pre-approval: show what is pending and when it lands, make pausing cheap, make every two-way write revertible.

Hard partsCopy Anchor Link

1. Actions, not edits. A generated floor runs Verbs with no inputs, or bypasses the model's logic in bulk and writes no history.
2. Attribution across actor kinds. One feed shows people, agents, keys, Customers in the portal, workflow steps, imports and chat acting for a member. Each entry names its source.
3. Timeline is not audit. The Customer's story and the data's audit have different readers; a Customer may see parts of the first, never the second.
4. Concurrency. Compare-and-set on every field ("Keep yours" or "Use theirs"), presence for people and agents, stale proposals.
5. Exports leak. An export is the main exfiltration path, so each one is an Action with a reason and its own permission.
6. Seats that match real jobs. Four Access levels suit a founder. A support team needs narrow money seats and separation of duties: whoever manages access does not move money.
7. Keep everything against erasure. Every Event is kept forever, and privacy law grants erasure. Admin is where the request arrives and shows a truthful state.
8. Schema under live data. Type changes keep unconvertible values aside, field keys freeze after publish, and a field in use is never removed silently.
9. Analytics flattened into tables. Event, Metric, Funnel and Goal as CRUD lists let an operator type in a value that must be derived. That is the anti-pattern this type avoids.

Day oneCopy Anchor Link

A founder with one to three people and several agents needs:

• search across every Noun, a list per Noun and the Thing page;
• the Business's Verbs with inputs, a reason on money and retire Verbs, and a consequence line;
• Undo on every two-way write, and retire and restore;
• bulk changes as one Change, and the Changes feed by actor kind;
• CSV import and export;
• four Access levels, each with Test or Live access;
• settings and the refund Policy;
• chat over all of it, and MCP and API parity.

In an Autonomous Startup the founder may not open Admin for days. Admin then serves agents through MCP and the API, and the human part shrinks to search, the Thing page, Changes and revert. Plan, Goals and Experiments sit in the Operating review, and Lifecycle and Publish beside Admin in the operator's shell.

Related studiesCopy Anchor Link

Prototypes this study needsCopy Anchor Link

1. 01

   Can one lifecycle notation hold concurrent machines, the ball and derived state?

   Encode a storefront Order, a booking with its payment, a delivery work item, a Task over its Action and a facility with its applications.

   names: Action
2. 02

   How does each type show a data request truthfully?

   One data-request record rendered in Admin and a portal, using only the recorded route for erasure.

   names: Admin