This is the one-picture guide. A signal or a request comes in, the Familiar plans a response, and anything that touches your systems waits for a human yes. Read it once and the other guides read as one system.
Soarcery has a few named parts, and the names carry weight. This guide puts them in one frame so the rest of the guides read as a system rather than a glossary. The loop is short: you state an outcome, the Familiar turns it into a plan, you approve it, the safe steps run, and every privileged step stops at a gate a person controls.
The loop at a glance
It starts in Cast, your conversation with the Familiar (the AI assistant). You describe what you want in plain English. The Familiar drafts a plan: the steps, the tools each one needs, and the assumptions behind it. Building and running happen as a background job you can watch, so nothing silently times out and a failed step offers a Retry. The steps that only read or enrich run on their own; the steps that would change something in your environment pause at a Seal (a human approval gate) until someone approves them. Whatever needs a person or a durable record becomes a Ticket, a case with a full timeline you can audit.
The five surfaces
Five surfaces carry the loop, and each owns one job. Cast is where you ask, in plain language, and where plans are proposed. The Spellbook holds the automations you save, hand-written and Familiar-built alike, ready to cast again. Seals is the queue of proposed actions waiting on a human decision, each showing what will happen, on what evidence, and how to reverse it. Tickets are the cases, each with the evidence, the reasoning, and every action on one timeline. The Bazaar is where you connect the tools your automations act through and adopt ready-made templates; a wired tool shows as Connected.
The one law
Every action that changes your environment, whether the Familiar proposes it or you ask for it directly, stops at a Seal: the system proposes, a person disposes. A contested result, where the evidence is genuinely split, always escalates to a person and can never close itself as safe. That gate is the contract between you and your automations, and it is the reason the loop is safe to run. Read Getting started next for the shape of the console, then Work the seals queue for the day-to-day.