What you see and what you can do inside Yellow comes from two things working together: ownership and roles. Ownership decides governance — who can change structure. Roles decide operations — who can read and edit data.

Ownership is implicit

If a tenant or schema is owned by you (user-owned) or by an organization where you are an owner, you have full implicit permission on it. You can read everything, write everything, change the structure and manage access. There is no role to assign — ownership is enough.

This is the simple case. Personal projects and small teams often never go beyond it.

Roles are explicit

When you are a member of an organization (not an owner), you start with no permissions. Roles, defined by an organization owner, are how access is granted to you piece by piece.

A role is a named bundle of capabilities scoped to one or more resources. The organization owner builds the role ("Sales agent", "Inventory clerk", "Read-only auditor") and then assigns it to specific members. Once assigned, those members can do what the role allows — nothing more.

What a capability lets you do

A capability is a single permission on a single kind of resource. The most common shapes:

Capability area What it grants
Read metadata See a schema, browse its models and properties. Without it, the schema does not even appear in your sidebar.
Read instances List and open the instances of a model.
Create instances Use the + New button on a model.
Update instances Edit existing instances.
Delete instances Soft-delete instances.
Manage files Upload, rename and delete files attached to instances.
Use the AI assistant Chat with the assistant and let it act on your behalf.

Capabilities can be scoped to a whole schema (every model inside it) or to specific models, depending on how the role is built.

"Own only" mode

Schemas can be set to Own only access (see Schemas). In that mode, every member can create instances but only sees the ones they themselves created. It is a quick way to model per-user data — private notes, personal submissions — without writing a custom role.

"I can't see this"

If a model, schema or button is missing for you, work down this list with the organization owner:

  1. Is the schema's access mode Private? If yes, you need a role that grants you read on it.
  2. Does your role include the relevant capability? A role may grant read but not write, or vice versa.
  3. Is the schema owned by an organization you belong to? If not, you can only see it if its access mode is Shared.
  4. Are you on the right tenant? Roles are per-tenant; switching tenants switches the set of permissions you carry.
  • Organizations — where roles are defined and assigned.
  • Schemas — access modes that combine with roles.
  • Tenants — the scope inside which roles apply.