All learning paths Learn See Try Make Decide where a run must stop What this lesson is about Sort every action by whether it can be undone, and put your approval in front of those alone.
A shop's supplier-mail workflow is handed to you, and the owner asks where the agent should stop and ask him. What first?
A Put an approval in front of every action, so nothing runs without the owner seeing it. B Sort every action by whether it can be undone. Reading and paying are not alike. C Ask the owner which actions worry him, and put the approvals there.
Check my recall Why this matters Anthropic's engineering note says agents pause for human feedback at checkpoints. Where those checkpoints go is the whole decision. Put one in front of everything and the owner learns to tap yes without reading. That removes the only prompt that mattered.
Decide where a run must pause, and write the rule as a table its owner can apply.
Anthropic's engineering note says agents pause for human feedback at checkpoints. Where those checkpoints go is the whole decision. Put one in front of everything and the owner learns to tap yes without reading. That removes the only prompt that mattered.
Sort every action by whether it can be undone. Reading and paying are not alike. Approval belongs in front of what cannot be undone, and nowhere else. Write the rule as a table the owner can apply without you in the room. Task Decide where the approval prompts go in a supplier-mail workflow for a shop.
Weak approach Puts an approval in front of all four actions, including reading the mail and drafting a reply. By the second week the owner taps yes without reading any of them.
Stronger approach Read and draft run alone. Send asks first. Pay asks and names the amount. Writes it as a four-row table.
Why the stronger approach works Four prompts train the owner to tap yes. Two prompts, on the two actions that stick, still get read.
Try a changed situation A clinic says its staff tap yes on every agent prompt without reading. How do you fix the workflow?
Make something yourself Take one workflow you know. Make a table of its actions: what each does, whether it can be undone, and who approves it. Mark the ones that run alone.
Lesson 5 of 9 on Running and checking AI agents next Count what a run costs Part 2 ends in a work sample you can send
Read the primary or official source: Anthropic · Building effective agents