[Bug] Engine not respecting autonomy levels

[Jake Smith (jsmith13)]

Which Microsoft Discovery surface?

Microsoft Discovery app (Windows desktop client)

For Services bugs only — which area in this repo?

N/A — this is an app bug

Specific catalog item (Services only)

No response

Microsoft Discovery app version

No response

OS version (app only)

No response

What were you trying to do?

Enable the engine to take actions like "cognition" or "tasks" without verification, ask for verification on file system operations or similar

Steps to reproduce

1. Create a Copilot CLI engine
2. Assign a task to the engine
3. Observe behavior
4. Stop the engine
5. Alter the autonomy level
6. Repeat

Expected behavior

Number of permissions requests changes with changes to the automation level

Actual behavior

• set Copilot CLI setting to Autopilot

• set autonomy level to the recommended Supervised setting

• permission check is required on every tool call (including internal tools like "cognition" or "tasks")

• changed autonomy level to Read-only to "auto-allow reads", no change in behavior

• very little information about what is being approved is provided, just the tool name

• noting that the full automation level works as advertised

Logs and diagnostics

No response

Severity

Major — Workaround exists, but it's painful

Confirmations

• I have searched existing Bugs discussions before posting.
• This report contains no sensitive, regulated, or proprietary data (no subscription IDs, tenant IDs, tokens, customer data, etc.).
• If this is a Services bug, it concerns catalog content in this repo (agent, starter-kit, tool, skill, docs, or utility) — not general Discovery services platform issues. (Tick N/A if this is an app bug.)

[Steven Truitt (stevetru1)]

Ack, and thank you for submitting. I just addressed this and you should see better behavior here in 0.15.1