Human in the loop

Human-in-the-Loop

A human gate is a strong control — and an expensive one. Place it where the cost matches the risk.

The default mistakes are equal and opposite: gate everything (the agent is a slow button), or gate nothing (the agent ships an irreversible mistake). Design the gates on a per-action basis, by failure cost, with the human's time treated as a scarce resource.

When to use this skill

• The user is building an agent that takes real-world actions (money, messages, data changes).
• The user is in a regulated workflow (healthcare, legal, finance, HR).
• The user reports "the agent did something bad once" and is reaching for blanket approval gates.
• The user reports "approval gates everywhere are killing throughput".

Tier the actions

Not all actions need humans. Classify before designing.

• Auto-execute. Read-safe, low-impact, reversible. No gate.
• Notify. Action executes; human is informed (digest, dashboard, audit log). Catch errors via sampling.
• Confirm. Action proposed; human approves before execution. Synchronous gate; cost is real.
• Review. Action executes; human reviews a sample asynchronously. Catches systemic issues without blocking.
• Override-only. Agent acts unilaterally; human can pause / reverse via a documented control. Trust-but-monitor.

The right tier per action is a function of (a) failure cost, (b) reversibility, (c) frequency, (d) detectability.

Decision flow

1. Is the action reversible at low cost? → yes → auto-execute with notify or sampled review.
2. Is the action irreversible OR high-cost on failure? → confirm gate. Synchronous human approval before execution.
3. Is the action frequent enough that confirm-gating kills throughput? → narrow the gate. Approve only the high-risk subset (above threshold, novel pattern, low model confidence).
4. Can the agent itself decide when to escalate? → yes, but the escalation criterion must be explicit and tested, not "when the model feels unsure".
5. Does the human have enough context to decide in <30s? → if no, the gate is theatre — the human approves blindly.

Patterns that work

• Confidence-gated confirm. Auto-execute when model confidence (or rule-based signal) is high; gate when low. Tune threshold by measuring human-override rate.
• Amount / impact threshold. Refunds <$50 auto; ≥$50 confirm; ≥$1000 senior-confirm.
• Sampled review. Auto-execute all; human reviews random 1% asynchronously. Catches systemic issues; doesn't block throughput.
• Propose / commit. Agent proposes a typed action that requires explicit commit. The commit is a button click in the UI, not "type yes" in chat.
• Escalate to specialist, not to chat. Escalation routes to a queue with role-appropriate context, not to a Slack channel for someone to maybe see.
• Time-bounded auto-approval. "If no human responds in 4 hours, auto-decline (or auto-approve, depending on default-safe direction)."

Failure modes when humans are in the loop

• Approval fatigue. Humans rubber-stamp after the first 50 approvals. Effective gate becomes auto-execute with extra latency.
• Theatre approvals. Human has no real context; clicks approve regardless. Worse than no gate.
• Bottleneck escalations. All escalations go to one queue; queue grows; humans burn out; system fails closed.
• Off-hours collapse. Human gates work in business hours; off-hours requests pile up; downstream SLAs miss.
• No appeal path. Wrong rejection has no recourse; users abandon the workflow.
• Reviewers are agents. "We have an agent review the other agent's output." Without humans in the loop, this is two agents, not human-in-the-loop.

Anti-patterns to flag immediately

• Blanket "approve every action" gates. Turns the agent into a slow button. Re-tier the actions.
• Approval UI with no decision-supporting context. Approve buttons next to truncated previews. Humans rubber-stamp.
• "Type yes to confirm". Trivially injected from untrusted content. Use a button, out-of-band confirmation, or signed receipts.
• Chat-based escalation. "I'll ping #ops". Pings get missed. Use a queue with ownership and SLA.
• Escalation criterion = "model confidence" without measuring what confidence calibration looks like.
• No timeout on the human side. Tickets sit forever.
• No audit trail. Approvals must be logged (who, when, why) for replay and post-incident review.
• Human-in-the-loop as compliance theatre. A gate that nobody can actually act on isn't a control; it's a checkbox.

Questions to ask the user

1. What's the failure cost per action — free, expensive, unrecoverable?
2. What's the action volume — 10/day, 10/sec? Determines whether confirm-gating is viable.
3. What context does the human need to decide in <30s?
4. What's the default-safe direction if the human doesn't respond — auto-approve or auto-decline?
5. Who owns the queue and what's the SLA?
6. Is there an audit trail for replay and review?
7. How will you detect approval fatigue — measure override rate, reverse-the-bots tests?

The hard line

If the human can't make a real decision in under 30 seconds with the context shown, the gate is theatre. Design the context first, the gate second.

Why this exists

Human-in-the-loop is the most-cited and least-designed safety control in agent systems. Teams add approval gates after an incident, hit throughput collapse, drop the gates, and ship the next incident. The discipline — tier actions, confidence-gate, design the decision UI, measure approval-quality — converts HITL from "we have a meeting about it" into a working control.

References

• references/action-tiers.md — auto / notify / confirm / review / override-only — examples per tier and failure cost.
• references/decision-ui.md — what context the human needs in the approval UI, with do/don't sketches.
• references/escalation-routing.md — queue design, ownership, SLAs, default-safe directions.

Related skills

• HITL is one defense in [[guardrails-and-safety]] and [[prompt-injection-defense]].
• Irreversible actions live behind HITL — [[tool-failure-handling]], [[tool-use-schema-design]].
• HITL adds latency — [[latency-budgeting]] must reflect it.
• HITL adds cost — [[agent-cost-modeling]] should include human-minute pricing.
• Every approval is a trace event — [[agent-observability]].
• Confidence gating depends on [[model-routing]] tier behaviour.