Every item Pickerbird can see sits in exactly one of three tiers. The tiers aren’t a warning system — they’re the actual gate the agent asks before it reads anything.
The three tiers
- Private — the AI cannot read it. Full stop. Not summarized, not embedded, not counted.
- Ask-me-first — the AI can request it, but only with your explicit consent, in the moment, for that use.
- Open — freely available to the agent as working context.
Graded by intensity, not by traffic light. The point isn’t “stop / caution / go” — it’s how much of yourself you’re lending to a given answer.
Why intensity, not colors
A red/yellow/green metaphor implies “open” is the safe default and “private” is the exception. Pickerbird inverts that: you decide the resting state, and the agent earns its way up the scale one consented step at a time.
Assigning a tier is a single field on the item — the same field the access check reads before retrieval:
item.tier = 'ask'; // private → ask → open, your call, changeable anytimeStart strict and open up where it’s useful, or the reverse. The tiers are yours to move; nothing moves them for you.