Ask for approval

Overview

A multi-phase agent workflow (plan, build, verify, merge) hits points only a human can decide. Never read silence, a timeout, an auto-approved permission check, or a passing test as a "yes". If the process can pause or restart between question and answer, save the "question is open" record before showing the question, not after.

When to use

• The workflow runs unattended, across separate invocations, or through a coordinator plus subagents, so no one is guaranteed to be watching.
• The decision is one only a human makes: approve a plan, merge vs. discard a branch, sign off that verification really passed, accept a scope change mid-task.

Do NOT use this in a live foreground session where the user answers in real time (just ask them), or for automated checks like tests or a build; those are CI gates, not human approval gates.

The pattern

1. Look first for a decision already on record for this same scope and result: if a human explicitly answered it before, that answer still holds. Restarting the process, switching tools, or trimming old context never resets it to unanswered.
2. State the question in the human's terms, with the real choices and what each leads to, not internal step names.
3. Persist before you ask: write an "open question" marker to durable storage first, only then show the question and stop. If the write fails, report that the gate could not be armed instead of asking.
4. Wait for an explicit answer. A timeout, no reply, an auto-approve rule, or a green build never counts as approval.
5. On resume, match the reply to the specific marker it answers. A generic "continue" counts only for what it directly addresses, never for a merge or sign-off it never named. Clear the marker once a real answer lands.

Stop condition: the gate closes only on a recorded, matching explicit answer, or a report that the decision is still blocked, never because the agent judged the question no longer needed one.

Quick reference

Common mistakes

• Asking first, writing the marker after: a crash between the two loses the record, so a restart proceeds as if nothing was asked.
• Treating a passing automated check as sign-off; it measures the code, not whether a human accepted the result.
• Letting a routine "continue" silently approve a specific step, like a merge, that the message never named.

Source

Repo https://github.com/maxritter/pilot-shell, file pilot/agents/agent-gate-protocol.md, read at commit 4d782c8f9940c572d82e918588a9a19e77547cd8. Licence: NOASSERTION (no OSS licence declared). Mechanism described in original wording; no sentence or code copied from the source.