Bind the review to the action that will run. Define what happens when the proposal changes, a worker resumes or the result is uncertain.
João Dezembro · 3 min
More in EngineeringAdd human approval by saving the proposed action, pausing before execution and recording a qualified person's decision against that specific revision. The worker must check that the action still matches the approval and current permissions before acting. A changed recipient or payload needs a new decision. An uncertain execution result needs checking before another attempt.
An agent drafts a customer message and can send it. The review needs to happen before the message leaves, while someone can still correct the recipient, promise or supporting information. Reviewing a copy afterward cannot prevent that disclosure.
Choose the checkpoint from the action's consequences and what the reviewer can realistically judge. A disposable draft has a different control requirement from a message sent to a customer or a change to their account.
This is a proposed design to test for one workflow, rather than a universal state model.
| Situation | Required behavior |
|---|---|
| Proposal ready | Save the target, recipient, payload and relevant evidence with a revision. Show what will happen, who may decide and what remains uncertain. |
| Waiting for review | Permit correction, rejection or escalation. Keep an owner and an agreed interim state. An expired deadline must not silently approve the action. |
| Approved or edited | Bind the decision to the final reviewed action. Revalidate meaningful edits; changed fields must not inherit approval for the previous revision. |
| Worker resumes | Check current permission, approval and the execution record before acting. Preserve the operation identity under the actual service contract. |
| Result uncertain | Establish what happened remotely before a potentially duplicate attempt. Keep unresolved effects visible and assigned for reconciliation. |
Imagine a person approves a message to one customer's contact. Before the worker sends it, the recipient changes. The execution check should stop that revised action and return it to review. The earlier decision covered a different destination.
Test a repeated resume request too, checking that it does not create a second send. Then simulate a timeout after the sending service accepts the message. The workflow should preserve the uncertain outcome and check the service's evidence and retry contract, rather than starting a fresh send. These are hypothetical acceptance cases, not results from a deployed agent.
A framework's ability to pause and resume does not establish your application's reviewer authority, action matching or retry behavior. Verify those in the implementation and test the external result, not just whether the worker continued.
The reviewer also needs usable evidence and time to judge it. Measure missed errors, unnecessary rejection and unresolved work alongside approval counts. This design does not guarantee exactly one external effect or establish that every consequential use is suitable for an agent.
Identify the action, reviewer and consequence first. Gridfused can help implement the approval boundary and test changes, resumed work and uncertain results.
Founder & Managing Director
Founder of Gridfused Technologies. Software architect and engineering leader focused on building reliable products, systems, and AI-enabled operations.
November 5, 2026
3 min
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