AI & Agent WorkflowsOpen accessPublished 3 Oct 2026
Designs approval/interrupt checkpoints in an agent graph that pause before risky or irreversible actions and route to a human decision. Covers which actions actually warrant a gate, how to shape the interrupt payload for fast human decisions, timeout/escalation behavior, and preventing interrupt fatigue that trains approvers to rubber-stamp. TRIGGER when: adding an approval step before an agent takes a consequential action, a human-in-the-loop gate is producing rubber-stamp approvals or is too slow, or designing what happens when nobody responds to an approval request. DO NOT TRIGGER when: adding basic input validation or confirmation dialogs with no real irreversibility …