What mandates can express
Question answered: Is this flexible enough for my use case? What kinds of constraints can I encode?
Mandates go well past a single price cap — item-level, multi-step, recurring, cross-counterparty, or evidence-dependent — within a deliberately small language.
Single purchase: Green sweater, size medium, 100% wool, max $100, from an approved merchant, delivered by Friday.
Bundled workflow: Paris → New York for two, departing the 14th–17th, flight and hotel booked separately, 4-star minimum, total cap $4,000.
Delegated spend: Approved vendor, monthly term, max $4,800, no auto-upgrade, no substituted payee, renewal date inside the authorized window.
The policy DSL (authored via the MCP) lets you compose constraints over evidence attributes drawn from the product taxonomy. Constraint types include:
- Value bounds: max price, quantity limits
- Attribute matches: size, color, material, specification
- Counterparty restrictions: approved merchant, no substituted payee
- Temporal conditions: delivery by date, renewal date inside a window
- Cross-item relationships: total cap across a bundled purchase
- Negation: no auto-upgrade, no substitution, no unauthorized categories
A policy is validated by the policy engine compiler before it is stored, so you know it is syntactically and semantically sound before any intent references it.
Where this becomes syntax
Section titled “Where this becomes syntax”What a mandate can express is fixed by the policy language it compiles to. Reading a policy shows the shape of one, its types, and how its constraints are evaluated.