Human-in-the-Loop Doesn't Scale - Human-on-the-Loop Does
Human approval of every agent action does not scale; it turns into rubber-stamping and false confidence. Use human-on-the-loop governance instead: agents act within strict limits for low-risk, reversible work, while humans handle exceptions and high-blast-radius decisions.
The approval that wasn't.
A team I worked with had done everything the safety playbook told them to. Every action their agent fleet took — open a ticket, adjust a config, refund a charge, deprovision a node — landed in an approval queue. A human had to click "approve" before anything happened. Human-in-the-loop. Audited. Compliant. The slide said "full human oversight."
Then I watched the human work the queue.
It was 300 items deep by mid-morning and growing. He was clearing it the only way a human can clear a 300-item queue: in batches, by pattern, in seconds. Open ticket — approve. Adjust config — approve. Refund $14 — approve. He wasn't reading them....
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