Accepted
AI agents operating in the orchestrator must decide when to proceed autonomously, when to pause for human approval, and when to surface a task and wait entirely. Without a shared classification system, agents either over-interrupt (training the human to click through without reading) or under-interrupt (missing high-stakes decisions mid-flight).
Three-tier classification:
[HOOTL]— AI executes autonomously; human audits after-the-fact. High confidence, deterministic outcome. Agent executes without prompting.[HITLFE]— AI handles routine prep, escalates exception to human for approval. Agent completes all prep work first, then pauses with a structured context summary (what was done, why input is needed, potential impact) before proceeding.[HIC]— Human-in-Command. Task requires creativity, judgment, or empathy that AI cannot substitute. Agent surfaces the task and waits.
Agents follow Prepare-Then-Prompt: no asking permission before acting on [HOOTL] tasks. Multiple [HITLFE] and [HIC] items are batched into a single daily briefing rather than scattered interrupts.
- Interrupt-on-uncertainty — ask the human whenever confidence drops below a threshold, without doing prep work first. Rejected: creates constant low-signal interrupts and shifts cognitive load onto the human before they have enough context to decide.
- Fully autonomous with human review after — agent completes everything, human reviews in post. Rejected: too late to catch high-stakes or hard-to-reverse actions mid-flight; removes meaningful human control over consequential steps.
- Explicit per-task approval prompts before every action — rejected: high friction, trains users to click through without reading, and collapses
[HOOTL]and[HITLFE]into one noisy mode.
- Agents must tag each task node at planning time; ambiguous tasks default to
[HITLFE]rather than[HOOTL]. - The daily briefing pattern requires agents to track which tasks pended human input across a session and surface them together at natural stopping points.
- This classification is an orchestrator-level convention; project submodules may adopt it internally but are not required to.