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2026-08-07

Where to place human approval gates in your agent loops

A practical method for deciding which steps need human sign-off: classify actions by reversibility, gate at boundaries, and keep loops moving while reviews are pending.

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Reading time: 5 min

Automating a loop is easy; knowing where a human should still sign off is the hard part. Here is a practical method. Step 1: classify every action by reversibility. Read-only calls, drafts, and local file edits are low-risk; sending emails, publishing content, paying invoices, or deleting records are high-risk. Gate only the high-risk class — approving everything trains reviewers to rubber-stamp. Step 2: place the gate at a boundary, not inside reasoning. The best position is right before an external side effect, after the agent has prepared everything. Reviewers then see a finished proposal with all context attached, instead of judging an intermediate thought. Step 3: make the pending state useful. Configure the approval timeout so the loop takes a fallback branch — for example, queue the item for the next business day — instead of blocking a whole batch on one decision. Step 4: use editable approvals. Let reviewers fix a field and approve in one click; every correction becomes a signal you can later turn into an automation rule. Step 5: audit everything. Keep the reviewer's identity and comment in the trace so you can answer who approved what, and retire any gate that never rejects anything. Default recipe: gate irreversible external actions, review approvals weekly, and remove gates with a 100% approval rate. Full guide available at https://getloopcraft.com — sapsap@qq.com.