High-stakes assumption: what it means
By Soumen Sarkar · October 2026
A high-stakes assumption is an assumption that touches data, money, access, public interfaces or deleting things, so being wrong costs more and it should be checked first.
A high-stakes assumption is still an assumption: stated, acted on, and open to correction. The work keeps going. What changes is the order in which people look: high-stakes ones get checked before anything else, because a wrong call there is harder to undo.
Five kinds of ground make an assumption high stakes:
- Data: migrations, schemas, what gets stored or kept.
- Money: prices, charges, refunds, rounding.
- Access: who can see or change what.
- Public interfaces: APIs, webhooks, anything other people's code depends on.
- Deleting things: records, files, accounts.
For example, an agent removing old sessions assumes "sessions inactive for 90 days can be deleted outright, with no export". That touches data and deleting things. It marks the assumption high stakes, writes the cleanup job behind a flag, and carries on with the rest of the task. A teammate sees it at the top of their list and corrects it within the hour: keep an export for 30 days first.
Marking stakes is a habit worth keeping in any team; the assumption line has a field for it. In Campfyrr, assumptions with these stakes are marked "High stakes" on Activity, while the agent that made one still keeps going.
The principle behind this: Turn unknowns into calls: Nothing we don't know gets to stop us. We name our assumption, and we move.
Related: Assumption · Correction · Activity
Questions that use it
Move as one at agent speed. Nobody waits. Add Campfyrr to Claude: it briefs every agent before it touches the code, keeps assumptions and handoffs where the team can see them, and never takes your code (what it keeps).