Machine-initiated work pauses at a gate until the actor consents — per action, per batch, or per diff — so autonomy never outruns the actor’s willingness to answer for the result.
Forms
Recurring forms: approve/reject on a single proposed action, batch review of queued actions, diff review of proposed changes, and graduated modes (suggest, confirm, execute) that move the gate rather than remove it.
Consequences
- nothing consequential happens without a human yes, which buys safety at the price of throughput: the agent now works at the speed of the actor's attention
- each gate is an interruption, and past some frequency approving stops being a judgement and becomes the habit the gate was meant to prevent
- the approval concentrates accountability: whoever clicked yes now owns an outcome they may have reviewed only glancingly
Resources & references
- AI UX Playground — Approval Workflows, Human in the Loop, Suggest / Confirm / Execute
- Shape of AI — Verification
- aiuxdesign.guide — Human-in-the-Loop
Appears in
Governing autonomy
- Checking costly actions, step 3 — Ask for approval
- Handing work over, step 1 — Extend the limit and continue
Related patterns
Serves
- Delegation — the execution-boundary checkpoint of delegation's lifecycle
Enacts
- Agency — keeps initiation and consent in different hands
Complements
- Cognitive forcing functions — deliberate friction that keeps approving a judgement rather than a reflex
Alternatives
- Undo — consent before the act and recovery after it are the two ends of one safeguard ladder
Related to
- Inline confirmation — the single-action rung of the same ladder; an approval gate reviews delegated work, often in batches
- Action consequences — supplies the severity reasoning for where a gate belongs
- Suggestion — accepting proposed content versus authorising an act — the same accept/reject core at different stakes
Preceded by
- Bounded autonomy — crossing a bound is a designed event rather than a failure: the work pauses and control returns to the actor for renewal, escalation, or takeback
- Change review — the delta is a reviewable object — what was, what would be, side by side or in place — so judgement lands on the change rather than on re-reading the whole, and an approval has something concrete to act on
- Plan preview — the agent's intention is now a reviewable object — steps, targets, expected effects — so misreadings surface while they are still cheap, and the preview becomes the thing an approval can act on