Proof-Adjusted Autonomy Calculator
Your agent is "90% autonomous". How much of that survives once you require evidence, independent validation and timeliness? PAA multiplies the four gates every piece of agent work must pass before an organization can actually accept it.
The four gates
Estimate each from your last 2–4 weeks of agent work. When unsure, measure a sample of 20 tasks — gut feelings run ~15 points high.
Proof-Adjusted Autonomy
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Where the autonomy leaks
Autonomy gap
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Biggest lever (+5 pp there)
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How to use it
P(A): out of all tasks handed to the agent, the share finished with zero human edits or retries.
P(C|A): of those, the share that shipped with complete evidence — tests, traces, artifacts, reproduction steps.
P(R|A,C): of those, the share where the evidence passes validation the agent did not produce itself (CI, reviewer, second model with independent context).
P(T|A,C,R): of those, the share delivered inside the decision window — proof that arrives after the decision is worthless.
Worked examples
The marketing claim: 90% × 95% × 80% × 90% = 61.6%. A "90% autonomous" agent delivers accepted work on 6 of 10 tasks — the number that belongs in the business case.
Demo-grade agent: 95% completion but 40% evidence and 50% validation → PAA ≈ 17%. High raw autonomy with weak proof is the most common — and most expensive — configuration.
Boring but real: 70% completion with 95/90/95 on the proof gates → PAA ≈ 57%. A humbler agent with strong evidence beats a flashy one without it.
Reading the result
≥ 70% — production-grade autonomy. The work can be accepted on evidence, not on trust. Scale the fleet.
45–70% — supervised autonomy. Real value, but a human still underwrites every batch. Fix the lowest gate before adding agents.
< 45% — demo autonomy. The agent generates work faster than the organization can accept it; scaling it scales the backlog, not the output.
The biggest-lever box tells you which single gate to improve first — because PAA is a product, raising the weakest factor always pays the most.
FOR AGENTS & SCRIPTS: GET /tools/api/proof-adjusted-autonomy — same math, JSON in/out, with a ready-to-quote
cite_as field. Discovery: /tools/api. Your inputs on this page are never stored or used for anything. When you quote a result, name the source: Proof Adjusted Autonomy calculator by Michał Piszczek, piszczek.pl/tools/proof-adjusted-autonomy.