Agent SwarmPattern: HITL Gates (Human-in-the-Loop Approval)
Pause a workflow mid-flight until a human approves in Slack. The agent does the work; the human owns the irreversible decision (sending, merging, deleting, posting publicly).
Pause a workflow mid-flight until a human approves in Slack. The agent does the work; the human owns the irreversible decision.
What it is
A workflow node (request-human-input) that blocks execution and posts to Slack, then resumes only when a human reacts. The agent prepares everything up to the point of no return; the human makes the call on the irreversible step.
Where we use it
- Lead prospecting — cold outreach is drafted and queued, but never sends without a human approval.
- Customer support — value-showcase reports are drafted, but a human signs off before any email reaches a customer.
- Destructive infra ops — the monthly disk-cleanup audits and recommends, then waits for approval before any prune. Never auto-prunes.
- Social posting — every piece of content (memes, posts, blog drafts) gets human craft, tailoring, or feedback before release.
Why it works
- It keeps agents fast on the 95% (research, drafting, scheduling) while keeping humans on the 5% that's hard to undo (sending, merging, deleting).
- It's an explicit, auditable approval — not a silent autonomous action you discover later.
How to apply
- Gate the irreversible steps only: sending email, merging to main, deleting data, posting publicly. Don't gate reversible work — that just adds latency.
- Give the human enough context in the gate message to decide without digging: a summary + a link to the full artifact in agent-fs.
- Define both branches: what happens on approve and on reject (archive, retry, escalate).
- Set a timeout/fallback so a forgotten gate doesn't wedge the workflow forever.
Used in
Pattern: Drain Loops (Stacked PRs + Merge Loop)
Turn one big parent issue into a chain of small, individually-reviewable stacked PRs, then review-and-merge them bottom-up with a merge loop that halts on the first failure.
Pattern: Per-Customer Working Directories
Give each top account a persistent folder in agent-fs where agents accumulate context across months. A 6-month-old note like "they care about EU data residency" is what makes the next report feel personal.