Human in the loop only works if the human has few things to approve

Many companies that deploy AI agents add a human in the loop. Before an agent does something consequential, a person is asked to approve it. It is easy to set up, and it feels safe.

It also wears out. According to Anthropic, users of its coding agent accept 93% of the permission prompts it shows them. Anthropic warns that this leads to "approval fatigue, where people stop paying close attention to what they're approving." The approval step is still there, but it checks far less than it seems to.

The same pattern, measured in medicine

Medicine has measured the same effect with clinical alerts. A study of 112 primary care clinicians, published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making in 2017, looked at three and a half years of their alerts and reminders.

The likelihood that a clinician accepted a reminder dropped by 30% for each additional reminder in the same visit. It dropped by 10% for each five-point rise in the share of reminders that were repeats. About a third of reminders were repeats for the same patient in the same year. The total amount of work made no difference. The number of alerts, and how often they repeated, did.

An agent asking "OK to proceed?" is the same kind of alert. A reviewer who sees many routine requests reads each one less closely.

Fewer approvals, chosen on purpose

So keep the human, but only for the actions that really need one. Then look at how many of those approvals one person can review properly in a day. If the agent sends more than that, slow the agent down so the requests arrive at a pace the reviewer can keep up with. Everything else can run without approval, as long as its record is checked afterwards, by a person or by an automated check that sits outside the agent.

Two questions sort most actions. Can it be undone? And what does it cost if it is wrong? An agent drafting a reply can run on its own. An agent sending money, changing a contract or contacting a customer for the first time should stop and ask.

When approvals are rare, each one gets read. The reviewer knows that a request means something.

AI workflow rewiring is one of Wyrework's services. With the people who do the work, we decide which agent actions need a human's approval, how fast those requests should arrive, and how everything else is checked, so each approval gets real attention.