Chapter 5: Human-in-the-Loop as Architecture¶
HITL done poorly is worse than no human at all. It creates the appearance of oversight without the substance. This chapter treats human-in-the-loop as a first-class architectural concern, not an afterthought.
What this chapter covers¶
- The three primitives -- approval gates, escalation policies, audit trails
- Design guidance -- structuring when and how humans intervene
- The working example: Incident Runbook Agent -- multi-agent with human approval before remediation
- When HITL is security theater -- rubber-stamping vs real oversight
- Cost of HITL vs value of HITL -- the tradeoff analysis most teams skip
- Building for auditability -- decision trails useful for debugging, compliance, and improvement
- Failure modes -- what breaks in human-agent interaction
Code companion¶
The working code for this chapter is in src/ch05_hitl/:
approval.py-- Approval gate implementationescalation.py-- Escalation policy engineaudit.py-- Audit logging system
See the Incident Runbook Agent project page for the full system architecture.
Get the full chapter¶
The complete chapter text is available in the book.