Human In The Loop

The primitive that treats humans as durable network participants, attention surfaces, queues, decision records, routing semantics, not as ad-hoc chat receivers.

Autonomy is not the absence of humans; it is knowing when human judgment is needed and making that handoff crisp.

Use this when

• A slice closeout needs classifying: auto-continue, human gate, or park
• A real decision needs to land in front of a human (usage limits, provider auth, roadmap tradeoff, product-intent ambiguity)
• Designing a human queue/dashboard surface
• Returning a hot potato to orchestration after human approval

Don't use this when

• The slice closeout is clean and PROGRESS.md already names the next safe slice. Default RSI conveyor continues; do NOT manufacture a human gate.
• The escalation is just a status update. Humans are participants for decisions, not narration.
• The next owner is another agent. Use queue-handoff, not human-in-the-loop.

The 3-class closeout classification

In a productized daemon-backed version, closeout classifies the next step BEFORE touching the human queue:

Class	When	Action
auto-continue	Slice closes cleanly, next named slice in workstream plan	Mark closed; create next-owner qitem from plan
human gate	Genuine decision needed (usage limits, provider auth, product-intent ambiguity, roadmap tradeoff)	Create human queue item with proof + decision text + recommended default + action outcomes
park	Intentionally stop the conveyor (e.g., waiting on external)	Stop with reason + resumption path

Failure modes (5)