Handing an AI assistant real jobs means deciding how much rope to give it. Henchman makes that a setting on each henchman rather than one rule for everyone.
Four levels
- Ask. Anything beyond looking things up asks you first.
- Standard. Small, contained changes go ahead; anything bigger, and anything that reaches other people, asks.
- Trusted. Like Standard, but a careful reviewer checks the rest and only passes you the doubtful ones.
- Full access. Where every henchman starts. It gets on with the job.
Change a level at any time, even mid-task, and it applies to the very next step.
What still stops a henchman on full access
- A short list of things it never does, at any level: erasing your disk, deleting your backups, turning off your Mac’s security, and similar.
- Rules you set. Block a henchman from things you never want it to do, and it won’t.
- Care after reading the web. After a henchman reads a web page, an email or a chat message, it checks with you before running commands or sending anything, so a page can’t quietly steer it.
Approvals you can read
When a henchman needs a go-ahead, it shows you the real thing: the email as it will be sent, the event with its time and guests, the exact change to a file. Choose Allow once, Always allow for that kind of request, or Deny. Pressing Return on its own never approves anything.
Seeing and undoing
Every change a henchman makes is recorded, with how it was approved. File changes can be undone from the activity list. Changes to each henchman’s permissions are logged in plain sentences too.
One switch for everything
Pause all henchmen stops every task and call at once. Nothing new starts until you resume, and messages from your phone get a short note saying the crew is paused.
Your vault
Passwords and keys you give your crew live in an encrypted vault on your Mac, protected by your Mac or by a passphrase. There’s no account and nothing to sign up for.
Honest limits
No AI assistant is perfectly safe, and Henchman doesn’t pretend to be. Henchmen can make mistakes, and web pages can try to trick them. The levels, the record and the pause switch are there so you can match the risk to the job.