Human in the loop
A person approves, edits or rejects the agent’s action before it takes effect.
Approval gates sit where a mistake is expensive or irreversible: sending an email, paying, merging, deleting. Everything cheap and reversible can run on its own. The design question is where the gates go, not whether there is a human at all.
Related terms
- AI agent: A model that decides its next step itself, calls tools and repeats until the task is done.
- Guardrails: Checks around a model that block, fix or flag inputs and outputs that break the rules.
- Evals: A repeatable test set that scores an AI feature, so changes can be measured instead of guessed.
