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Human in the Loop (Approval Gate Design)

Designs and verifies auditable human approval gates, escalation paths, and safe state transitions for risky AI agent actions.

Security & ReviewAdvanced16232AI score 9/10Last updated: Aug 9, 2026

What it does

  • Inventories every action an agent can take and assigns a risk tier based on reversibility, value, blast radius, and data sensitivity.
  • Picks the lightest sufficient control: autonomous-with-audit, notify-after, review-before, step-up approval, dual control, or prohibited.
  • Specifies an explicit state machine (prepared -> pending_review -> approved | rejected | expired) plus expiry, timeout-to-deny, escalation, compensation, and break-glass paths.
  • Designs the approver's decision package (exact action, before/after diff, provenance, uncertainty, safe reject/edit) and an append-only decision record schema with retention/redaction rules.
  • Ships assets/approval-policy-template.json, a validator at scripts/validate_gate_policy.py, and design guidance in references/gate-design-guide.md.

Who it's for

  • Engineers and architects building agents with real execution power: payments, outbound email, deploys, access grants.
  • Platform, security, and compliance teams that need separation of duties and audit trails.
  • Teams upgrading a bare "confirm?" prompt into a defensible approval system.

Example uses

  1. Refund agent: auto-refund under $50 for verified duplicate charges, support manager above $50, finance plus support above $1,000, with approval bound to order, amount, destination, and policy version.
  2. Customer comms agent: agent drafts, account owner approves exact recipients, subject, body digest, attachments, and send time; any edit invalidates the approval.
  3. Audit of an existing workflow: generate tests proving self-approval, duplicate callbacks, and expired approvals cannot execute twice.

· · · Install guide · · ·

Try it now, no install

Paste this into Claude to use the skill without installing anything.

Read the instructions in this file and follow them to help me:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/seb1n/awesome-ai-agent-skills/HEAD/agent-engineering/human-in-the-loop/SKILL.md

What I want: (describe your task here)

If Claude can't open the link, open it yourself and paste the contents instead.

If it works for you, download the ZIP below and install it. Then it runs on its own — no pasting each time.

Install in the Claude app (no terminal)
  1. Download the ZIP with the button below.
  2. In Claude, open Settings → Capabilities and turn on 'Code execution and file creation'. (one time)
  3. Go to Customize → Skills → + → 'Upload a skill' and upload the ZIP.
Download ZIP
Install in Claude Code

Let Claude do it — paste this into Claude Code

Install the skill I found on Claude Skill Mart.
Copy the agent-engineering/human-in-the-loop folder from the GitHub repo seb1n/awesome-ai-agent-skills into my ~/.claude/skills/human-in-the-loop/.
When it's done, tell me in one line what this skill can do.

Install with a command instead

git clone https://github.com/seb1n/awesome-ai-agent-skills.git /tmp/aas && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r /tmp/aas/agent-engineering/human-in-the-loop ~/.claude/skills/

This is a third-party skill. Check the source repository before installing.

  1. Open a terminal.
  2. Create the skills folder: mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
  3. Clone the repository: git clone https://github.com/seb1n/awesome-ai-agent-skills.git /tmp/aas
  4. Copy just this skill: cp -r /tmp/aas/agent-engineering/human-in-the-loop ~/.claude/skills/
  5. Verify the files: ls ~/.claude/skills/human-in-the-loop (expect SKILL.md, assets, scripts, references).
  6. Restart Claude Code, then ask something like "design an approval gate for my agent's payment action".
  7. Install Python 3 if you want to run the policy validator: python3 --version