Placing the approval step

Every agent on Czar waits for a person before it sends, spends, or changes a record. The platform insists on the pause. The operator decides exactly where it goes. That placement is one of the more important decisions in drawing an agent, because it determines what the reviewer sees, what the agent can do unattended, and how much of the reviewer's attention each run consumes.

The rule of thumb

Place the waiting step immediately before the step that acts on the world. Not before reading. Not before drafting. Right before the call that would change something outside the appliance.

The reason is what the reviewer gets to look at. If the pause comes after the draft is complete, the reviewer sees a finished proposal with the passages that support it. They can judge it in one look. If the pause comes earlier, the reviewer is being asked to approve something that has not been worked out yet, which is a worse decision made with less information.

Reading the packet changes nothing. Retrieving passages from the material the agent may read changes nothing. Producing a draft changes nothing, as long as the draft stays on the appliance. These steps are bounded by the version already: the agent can only read what it was given and can only draft from what it read.

Putting a pause in front of them adds a reviewer's attention without adding safety. The operator should let the agent read and draft on its own and spend the reviewer's time where the consequence is.

One pause per action

For a desk whose only consequential step is at the end, the canvas has one waiting step near the end. The agent reads, drafts, waits, and then makes the allowed call or ends. The reviewer sees one draft per run and makes one decision.

This is the common shape. A claims desk that drafts a determination and then updates the claim record has one pause before the update. An intake desk that drafts a routing decision and then routes has one pause before the routing call.

Some desks act more than once in a run. An agent might request a missing document from another system partway through, then draft a determination, then update a record. Requesting the document is a call that reaches outside the appliance, so it sits behind a waiting step. Updating the record is another, so it sits behind another.

Each pause is placed at its own boundary, directly before its own call, with the draft relevant to that call in view. The reviewer at the first pause sees the request the agent wants to make and why. The reviewer at the second sees the determination and its sources. These may be the same person or different people, depending on how the admin has assigned the reviewer role.

What the reviewer should be given at the pause

The operator draws the waiting step so that the reviewer sees the draft the agent produced, the passages it drew from, and the call it proposes. In Agency Studio this is the natural result of placing the pause after the drafting step and before the calling step, because those are the things in hand at that point.

The operator should resist the urge to summarize for the reviewer. The passages are the evidence. A reviewer who sees them can check the agent's work. A reviewer who sees only a summary is trusting the agent twice.

The placement is frozen

Once the design is published, the position of each waiting step is part of the version. It does not move between runs. An operator cannot accidentally leave the pause out of one run, and a packet cannot talk the agent into skipping it. If the operator later decides the pause belongs elsewhere, they move it on the canvas, publish a new version, and point the stable address at it. The change is recorded.

The article An agent that waits before it acts describes the waiting step from the reviewer's side. Approvals by named roles describes who may sit on it.

A short checklist for operators

Before publishing, walk the canvas and ask of each step whether it sends, spends, or changes a record. Every step that does should have a waiting step directly before it. Every waiting step should have a complete draft and its sources in hand. No waiting step should sit in front of a step that only reads or drafts. If the canvas passes that walk, the approval steps are where they belong. The governance page describes how approval fits with the other controls on the appliance.