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Field Note

Designing a human-in-the-loop that people actually use

Approval fatigue kills automation. Here is how we keep the human in control without making them a bottleneck.

Apr 22, 20264 min read

98.2%

Approvals under 10s

The fastest way to break an automation is to ask a person to approve everything, all the time, with no context. They either rubber-stamp it or stop looking.

Our rule: an approval should take less than ten seconds to make confidently. That means the action, its inputs, and the reasoning sit in one line - no tab-switching, no hunting for context.

We tier actions by reversibility. Reversible, low-impact actions can run on a short timer with an undo window. Irreversible actions always wait for an explicit Approve. Denials are one click and route back with a reason.

Done right, the human stays genuinely in control while reviewing a queue that moves fast. Oversight becomes a habit, not a chore.

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