Human-in-the-Loop

And the patterns that stand alongside it, or against it —

• complementsStep Budget★★— Cap the number of tool calls or loop iterations the agent is allowed within a single request.
• complementsCompensating Action★★— Pair every irreversible-looking agent action with a compensating action that can undo or counteract it.
• alternative-toConversation Handoff to Human★★— Transfer the entire conversation thread from agent to human operator, with state transfer and return primitive.
• alternative-toCommunicative Dehallucination★— When an instructed agent would have to invent missing context to comply, have it reverse roles and ask the instructor for the missing detail before answering.
• complementsPolicy-as-Code Gate★— Evaluate every proposed agent action against externally-managed machine-readable policies before dispatch, so compliance authorship lives outside the prompt and outside the agent code.
• complementsSimulate Before Actuate★— Before issuing an irreversible action, run a deterministic simulation that computes pre-conditions, invariants, and expected deltas; require a verifier — automated or human — to green-light the simulated outcome before the real command is sent.
• complementsSocratic Questioning Agent★— Drive the agent toward its goal by asking the user a sequence of strategic, open-ended questions that surface the user's own latent knowledge, goal, or context — rather than producing an answer directly.
• complementsDry-Run Harness★— Simulate planned actions (and their projected side effects) without committing them, surfacing a reviewable diff before any commit.
• complementsPipeline Triad Pattern★— Staff each pipeline stage with a triad — Creator generates an artifact, Critic finds flaws, Arbiter makes a binding PASS/FAIL/PARTIAL decision — with four explicit human gates between stages.
• complementsContext Gap (Security)✕— Agents faithfully follow explicit security rules but miss the broader implications — they log access correctly without flagging the unusual pattern a human expert would catch immediately.
• complementsConstrained Adaptability✕— Agents recalculate within declared tools and rules like a GPS rerouting, but cannot creatively transcend those boundaries to invent new approaches the way humans do.
• complementsPriority Matrix (Conflict Resolution)★— Pre-define how the agent must resolve specific classes of goal conflicts via a human-authored lookup table — transforming the agent from a decision-maker (where it fails on competing objectives) into a decision-implementer.
• complementsConfidence-Checking Workflow★— Always ask the agent, for each part of its output, to state its confidence and identify which parts need human verification, like triaging a junior analyst's work.
• complementsAutonomy Slider★— Expose agent autonomy as a continuous adjustable parameter so the same codebase can span scripted assistant to fully autonomous worker without re-architecting.
• complementsCorrigible Off-Switch Incentive·— Design the agent so being shut down or overridden by a human carries positive expected value, because the human's intervention is itself evidence the current objective is mis-specified.
• complementsGenerative UI★— Let the agent decide which interface components to render at runtime and stream them to the frontend over a typed protocol, so the surface follows the agent's output instead of being hardcoded.
• complementsRisk-Tiered Action Autonomy★— Set an agent's permitted action class by the financial materiality of the action, letting it read and draft freely while requiring a different human principal to release material postings, payments, or filings.
• conflicts-withAccountability Laundering via Algorithm✕— Anti-pattern: route a hard decision through an agent so no person owns the outcome, treating the recommendation as the decision while the firm's legal liability stays unchanged.
• complementsScope-of-Practice Boundary Gate★— Block requests and responses that perform license-gated professional activities unless a licensed human is in the loop, enforcing the boundary in code outside the reasoning loop.
• complementsMandatory Red-Flag Escalation★★— Maintain a deterministic set of high-risk triggers so that on any match the agent immediately aborts its workflow and hands off to a human, without weighing whether to escalate.
• complementsChange-Freeze-Aware Action Gate★— Check every mutating agent action against an active deploy-freeze or maintenance calendar and block it or force explicit human re-authorisation while a freeze covering its scope is in effect.
• complementsDeployment-Correlated Rollback Gate★— Gate an incident-response agent's authority to execute a rollback on whether the failure is temporally correlated with a recent deployment, unlocking autonomous rollback only on a clear deploy-to-failure link and escalating otherwise.
• complementsAdvisory-to-Mandate Escalation✕— Anti-pattern: an advisory decision-support output is silently promoted by institutional protocol into a binding order, and a domain expert's evidence-based refusal to follow it is reframed as non-compliance rather than legitimate judgement.