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Glossary · Mandate

Mandate

A mandate is a capability your company did not have, shipped and owned by you. Not a project you have to run.

How it is de-risked: one fixed price, frozen before work starts. Acceptance criteria both sides sign. A senior engineer's signature on everything that ships, payment on your acceptance, and 90 days of warranty.

I.

What it is

A mandate is one named outcome at one fixed price. Before work starts, the price freezes and both sides sign the acceptance criteria: the short, testable list that defines done. Agents build it, a senior engineer signs it, and you pay on acceptance. Not hours. Not access. The outcome itself.

II.

What it isn't

It is not a consulting engagement billed by the hour. It is not a SaaS subscription with seats. It is not a deliverable with a soft commitment. The unit of value is the shipped outcome, not the time spent or the tool used.

III.

The guarantee

If we miss, we keep working at no extra cost until every criterion is met. On acceptance the code is yours, and 90 days of warranty arm on what ships: defects triaged in hours, fixed at our cost, each fix landing with a permanent test.

Dev shops collect regardless of outcome. We keep working until it ships.
The guarantee
IV.

Where it fits

A mandate takes one of a stated number of parallel slots; when the slots are full, we say so and give you a date. Prebuilt mandates from the catalog have shipped before and start without an estimate round; bespoke mandates are scoped from your probe report. Every mandate is delivered by Cambrian, the system that builds and proves it.

V.

How to start one

Start with the free probe: twenty minutes, read-only, against your repositories. You get a scored readiness report the same day, with your first mandates already priced. Prefer to talk to a person first? Start a conversation and you hear back within a day.

VI.

Related terms

The mandate lives inside a small lexicon. Each term names one moving part of the way we work.

Probe
The free first step: twenty minutes, read-only, against your repositories. You get a scored readiness report the same day, with your first mandates priced.
Acceptance criteria
The signable list that defines done. Written before work starts, signed by both sides, and proven one by one with evidence attached.
Senior gate
Nothing ships on agent output alone. A named engineer reads the work and signs it, and the signature is what you are buying.
Warranty
90 days on what ships. Defects are triaged in hours and fixed at our cost, and every fix lands with a permanent test.
Slots
Parallel capacity, stated honestly. A mandate takes an open slot; when the slots are full, we say so and give you a date.
Paid diagnostic
The deeper probe for scope that cannot be signed yet. It ends in criteria you could sign, or in the honest answer that it is not a mandate.
Standing mandate
A mandate that recurs: one named outcome delivered every month with evidence, at a printed monthly price, cancel any month. The first two: CVE custody, criticals kept at zero with a pack your auditor can read, and app custody, the apps your own people built kept alive, owned, and provably restorable.
App custody
The standing mandate for business apps your people built with AI, from repository-backed Claude Code projects to no-code tools. Each app gets an owner, reviewed access, a timed monthly restore, a smoke test, one signed fix, and a current register.
Census
The free inventory for apps your team built with AI. One 30-minute interview plus read access to the repositories and platforms you use produces one page per app and the count. It ends on one question: can this be restored?