Safety & Guardrails

Every automated decision in Layers is gated by safety guardrails. These are non-overrideable unless explicitly stated.

Optimizer guardrails

Applied to every pause / budget / bid decision the optimizer proposes:

1. Min age 3 days - no action on an entity younger than 3 days.
2. Min 100 impressions - budget/bid changes require at least 100 impressions of data.
3. Min $5 spend (content-refresh disable step) - ads with under $5 spend are not disabled.
4. Never disable TOP_PERFORMER or HEALTHY ads.
5. Never empty an adset/adgroup - if pausing would leave zero active ads, the optimizer holds.
6. Max 50% change and $100 absolute per budget move.
7. Action caps per cycle: no more than 40 total actions or 20 pauses in a single optimizer cycle.
8. Cooldowns between repeat actions on the same entity: 48h structural, 48h budget, 24h bid.
9. Min confidence 0.5 - proposals below this confidence score are rejected.

Creative generation guardrails

Applied to generation workflows:

1. Ad eligibility / safety review - content whose upstream safety check fails (safety.pass = false or metadata.adEligibility.eligible = false) is marked safetyFailed = true and forced to organic_score = 0, permanently excluding it from ad selection.
2. Approval policy - projects with metadata.approval_policy.requiresApproval = true block scheduling of any content whose approval_status isn't approved or not_required.
3. Credit gate - generation commands check available org credits before queuing. If the org is out of credits the request fails with HTTP 402.

Distribution guardrails

Applied to social posts:

1. Posts-per-day cap - Social Distribution limits posts per platform per day based on the selected provider (e.g. 2 for ds, 4 otherwise).
2. Account health - if a social account's OAuth token is invalid or the account has been flagged, distribution activities error out for that account.
3. Approval gate - if the project's approval policy requires human approval, scheduled posts wait until a human approves before publishing.

Spending guardrails

1. Generation credit cap - enforced per request against the org's credit balance. Overages are billed automatically at the end of the billing period via Stripe.

How to override

• Manual pauses / resumes on ads, adsets, campaigns - done in the app or via API; the optimizer's cooldowns apply equally to manual changes within the project window.
• Creative overrides - use project_ads_content.override = 'include' / 'exclude' to force a creative in or out of ad selection.

What to do when a guardrail fires

Check the workflow run in the layer's Runs tab. Every proposal the optimizer rejects records a reason (e.g., "Entity too young (2d < 3d minimum)", "Change exceeds 50% cap"). Fix the underlying condition (age up, spend up, manual approval) or wait for the next cycle.