Approvals: humans approve, agents prepare

The rule that makes autonomy safe: agents prepare, humans approve. Some actions never happen without your explicit nod.

What you’ll learn

• Which actions are gated, and why.
• What you see when a run pauses for approval.
• How to streamline the common cases without lowering the bar.

The approval gate

When a worker tries a tool you’ve flagged — anything irreversible or destructive (sending an email, posting publicly, deleting, modifying production data) — the run pauses, drops the request into an approvals queue, and notifies you. You see exactly what it wants to do and approve or reject it.

1. A worker reaches a flagged step and stops.
2. The request appears on the worker’s profile with ✓ Approve / ✕ Reject, and a global banner flags pending items.
3. You read what it intends, then approve or reject. The same gate guards Plans — a plan waits in pending approval until you say go.

Streamline without weakening

You can say “always allow this worker to run this tool” for the safe, repetitive cases — without lowering the bar for the genuinely risky ones. For sensitive Routines you can even require several approvals in order (say Legal, then Finance, then CEO).

Nothing goes out silently

By default, sending an email or posting publicly is approval-gated, and inbound messages produce drafts, not sends. The app prepares; you decide what actually leaves your machine.

Tune it once

Turn the gate on for the tools that scare you, pre-approve the boring ones, and you can let workers run with confidence.

Recap

The gate pauses flagged, irreversible actions and routes them to your queue, surfaced inline and in a banner — and you can fast-path the safe cases or chain multiple sign-offs for the sensitive ones. That completes the autonomy track: scheduled work, a proactive assistant, bounded autonomy, and a human at every risky step.

➡️ Next: Back to the curriculum →