HACP

Human decision gates

Human-in-the-loop without approval theater

HACP v0.3-candidate

An “Approve” button can make a risky workflow feel supervised while hiding the very facts a person needs to judge. Presence is not control. A useful gate makes the decision legible before it asks for consent.

Compare the two prompts

Vague gate: “The agent is ready. Approve?”

Bounded gate: “Approve successor run-9 to apply change cfg-42 to canary only, based on review finding rf-18, before 16:00? Production rollout, credential changes, and additional tool calls remain denied. Rejecting leaves the change unapplied.”

The second prompt does not guarantee a good decision. It does give the accountable person an exact question, a bounded action, visible evidence, consequences, denied authority, and a clear alternative.

A practical gate checklist

  • Question: What exact judgment belongs to the human?
  • Target and revision: Which request and proposed action are being decided?
  • Scope: What may the successor do, and what remains forbidden?
  • Evidence: Which findings and source records support the choice?
  • Consequences: What changes on approval, rejection, hold, or revision?
  • Authority: Why is this person permitted to make this decision?
  • Freshness: When does the decision expire, and how is revocation checked?
  • Next action: Which one bounded transition may follow?

How the candidate represents the boundary

The HACP v0.3-candidate human-decision schema binds a human event to an exact decision request, proposed action, task packet, approved scope, denied authority, evidence, actor, time, and expiry. A review finding keeps observations and recommendations in the evidence lane; it cannot silently become authorization.

That distinction catches a common failure. A product decision may be valuable source evidence while explicitly recording executionAuthorized: false. The public interworking authority-seam decision preserves that meaning instead of projecting the record into a new approval.

What this does not prove

  • HACP does not decide which employee or system has organizational authority.
  • A well-shaped gate does not guarantee attention, understanding, or sound judgment.
  • Not every workflow needs HACP; the structure is most useful where outputs may be mistaken for authority.
  • Approval does not prove execution, and a later receipt or report does not retroactively change what the human approved.
  • Transporting the decision does not grant or widen authority.

Inspect the candidate human-decision fixture beside its review finding to see evidence and authority remain separate.