I Added a Human Veto to My PM Agent — Here's What Broke First
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Human veto in PM agent is a real-world agent orchestration pattern.
The author added a human approval step to a PM agent that posts Jira status to Slack, but found that after three weeks they were rubber-stamping approvals, defeating the purpose. The fix required adding friction—mandatory comments instead of emoji reactions—and implementing a severity classifier to gate only irreversible actions. The article also highlights lessons on escalation hooks and distinguishing irreversible from annoying-to-undo actions, inspired by Microsoft Conductor's designed-in human-in-the-loop pattern.
- Design human approval gates with mandatory engagement (e.g., typed comments) and severity classification to avoid rubber-stamping and reduce friction.
For a solutions architect building agent orchestration workflows, this reveals a hidden failure mode in human-in-the-loop systems—cognitive offloading by the operator—and provides concrete patterns (friction, severity gating, timeout escalation) to keep human review effective.