When to ask you

Think of it when you set an agent to work and decide what it must stop and ask about.

In everyday life

It is like a house sitter who waters the plants and fixes a dripping tap without calling you, but phones before anyone cuts down a tree. A call about every plant wastes your day; no call about the tree costs the tree.

One case

An agent works overnight on a hotel booking site and meets 6 decisions. It asks you about two of them, a function name and a folder name, and nobody answers until morning. It decides the other four alone, and one of them deletes an old bookings table that has no backup. It asked about the wrong ones: the names were safe to decide, and the table cannot come back.

The agent asked about the safe calls and not the risky one
The case, cell by cell1 cell = 1 decision
Who should decide
agentagentyouagentagentagent
Who decided
youyouagentagentagentagent
Decisions sent the wrong way
3
Decisions that cannot be undone
1
Names can be changed tomorrow. A deleted table with no backup cannot.

Every case

You are slow to reach, and waiting for you costs hours. Most agent choices can be undone with a revertUndo one saved change by adding a new change that reverses it. The rest of the history stays., and questions about those waste time and teach you to approve without reading. A few choices are different: deleting data, spending money, messaging customers, putting a change live, and product calls only you can make. For those, the agent must stop and ask, with the context and its recommendation in the question.

The word

Engineers call this

human in the loopThe rule for which decisions an agent makes alone and which it brings to you. It decides what can be undone, and asks you about product direction, values only you have, and steps that cannot be undone.

Let the agent decide anything it can undo, and report it. Make it stop and ask before anything it cannot undo, and on calls that are yours to make.

Where this idea leads

Skills that encode it

  • principle-never-block-on-the-human pstackProceed, then present on reversible work; irreversible actions such as deleting production data still require confirmation.
  • full-send tstackAsks only when it cannot continue alone, with the context and its recommended option first; decides the rest and lists it.
  • poteto-mode pstackAlways pause for irreversible writes: deploys, data deletion, customer messages. Reversible work proceeds without asking.
  • wizard Matt PocockSteps only a human can perform, such as entering secrets in a dashboard, get a guided script for the human to run.