Human in the Loop

Human in the loop means putting a person’s approval at a specific point in an automated process, so a machine proposes and a person decides before a high-stakes action goes through. The loop is the automated flow; the human is a gate inside it rather than a reviewer reading logs afterward. For the gate to hold across hours or days, the flow has to pause where it waits and resume when the answer arrives, which is what durable execution provides.

Blast radius decides where the gate goes, not capability. A misfiled label is cheap to get wrong; a wrong payment or a sent email is not. Place the gate where a mistake would be expensive and let the cheap steps run unattended.

Autonomy is earned in three stages: manual runs first, then the system drafts while a person approves every output, then unattended action, only once reviewed runs show the step and its failure path are reliable.