AGENTS AT WORK · 05 A visual series

Human gates

The agent stops here until a person types the exact keyword. Try each response and see what actually moves the gate.

PLAN BUILD

The problem this replaces

An ungated pipeline

PLAN (wrong assumption) CODE WRITTEN MISTAKE FOUND — after the fact

Nothing stopped the plan before it became code. The wrong assumption only surfaces once it's expensive to fix.

How it works

Only two inputs move the gate

"approve" → opens "feedback: ..." → revise anything else → rejected → THE GATE
No amount of clever phrasing counts as approval — the gate only recognizes these exact shapes.

Feedback loops don't have infinite patience either — see "The review loop" for what happens when revisions keep not landing.

See it in action

One plan, one round of feedback

plan presented → "feedback: use existing CSV lib" → plan revised → "approve" → branch created

One round of feedback, then approval — the branch didn't exist until that word was typed.

So what

Nothing is written before you type approve.