The Capability That Was Left Out
A queue that fills up invites a consumer. That is what queues are for, and building one is the natural next commit: work is waiting, capacity is idle, and a small worker loop would close the gap. This workshop does not have that worker, and the absence is written down as an invariant rather than left as an unimplemented feature.
The wording matters. It is not "authorship is not automated yet." It is: no timer, queue consumer, retry loop, or server-side launcher may initiate authorship. Stated that way, the boundary has an edge you can test a proposal against, which is the whole reason to state it.
Why an Invariant and Not a Setting
Nobody arrives asking for autopilot. What arrives is a sequence of individually reasonable requests. Retry the run that died halfway, because a crashed session leaving a half-finished job is obviously bad. Start the next queued item when one finishes, because the capacity is right there. Kick off the overnight batch, because nobody is awake to click anything at 3 a.m. and the work is already approved.
Each of those is defensible in isolation, and together they are an autopilot assembled by accretion. A default gets changed; an invariant gets argued with. Making it an invariant does not forbid the discussion — it forces the discussion to be about the boundary rather than about a checkbox.
What Is Actually Being Protected
Two things, and they are worth separating.
The first is judgment at the moment it is worth the most. The person who did the work holds the context, and the minute after producing something is when a question about it is cheapest to answer. An unattended run answers no questions, because there is nobody in the room to ask.
The second is the absence of double authorship. A job that dies mid-session leaves visible state and waits. It is resumed or re-run by a human decision, never silently retried — because a retry that cannot tell "crashed before writing" from "crashed after writing" will happily produce the work twice, and the second copy looks exactly as legitimate as the first.