Forget fuzzy “human in the loop” advice. Use three knobs—risk, ambiguity, visibility—to decide where you stay in control vs. let agents run free.
The story
Most “put a human in the loop” advice is vibes-based. I like knobs.
When I design agentic AI teams, I use three knobs to decide *where* I stay in the loop vs let the system run:
1. Risk: what happens if it’s wrong?
– Money, safety, legal, reputation → I’m in the loop.
– Reversible and low-impact → I can relax to on-the-loop or automation.
2. Ambiguity: how many weird edge cases?
– Fuzzy requirements, fast-changing context → more human checkpoints.
– Stable, boring, well-defined → great spot for agents to roam.
3. Visibility: who will get asked “who decided this?”
– If a reasonable person wants a name, I want a human answer, not “the model did it.”
Then I map those across the lifecycle:
– Framing & task design: human-led. This is where the wrong goal quietly ruins everything.
– Data & knowledge: agents collect; I gatekeep what becomes “blessed truth.”
– Policies & prompts: I treat them as code and bake in escalation rules.
– Execution:
– HITL for customer, financial, or rights-impacting flows.
– On-the-loop for internal drafts and low/medium risk.
– Automation only where impact is low *and* reversible.
The real skill isn’t “using AI.”
It’s designing *where* your judgment lives in the system.
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