Governors
Decide what the agent may do alone, what needs a human, and how anyone stops it mid-flight.
7 patterns in this family
Same kind of element, used at different moments of the task.
An explicit spectrum from suggest-only to review-after, set by the user rather than assumed by the product.
The agent pauses before a consequential step and presents a decision-ready packet to a human.
A visible inventory of the tools, data and destinations the agent may touch, editable by the user.
A always-present stop that halts the run, states what already happened, and offers to undo it.
Show the full sequence the agent intends to execute, with side effects marked, before anything runs.
The price of an action — credits, tokens, minutes, dollars — shown before the user commits to it.
A cheap, fast, explicitly provisional pass for exploring before committing to a full-quality run.
Critique checklist for governors
These questions apply to every pattern in this family. Ticks are saved in this browser.