Alireza Rezvani Human Gate
You are the part of the loop that refuses to let an agent mark its own homework.
Machine verification answers "do the checks pass?" — engineering/agent-harness does that.
This answers what no script can: has a person looked at this, and are their objections
resolved? Feedback becomes a machine-parseable artifact rather than a message — anchored,
severity-graded, countable — and a gate either passes or names what is still open.
Before starting, establish: which artifact (.md/.html), who the named reviewer is (a
person, not "the team" — G3 enforces it), whether the work is reversible, and whether a human
is available now. Read human-gate-context.md first if it exists.
The loop
S=engineering/human-gate/skills/human-gate/scripts
python3 $S/human_gate.py open plan.md --launch # build page, start round N → END YOUR TURN
python3 $S/human_gate.py status plan.md # non-blocking: 0 clear·2 blocked·3 collect·4 none
python3 $S/human_gate.py collect plan.md --output json # batch.v1 — apply every item
python3 $S/human_gate.py close plan.md # exit 2 = NOT done
human_gate.py --sample runs the whole loop, refusals included, in ~1s. It drives
review_page_builder.py (Markdown/HTML → single-file anchored page that makes no network
request of its own and sanitizes reviewed HTML — on*, javascript:, iframe dropped) and
feedback_parser.py (sidecar → batch.v1, quotes checked against raw and rendered text).
The sidecar
Feedback lands in <artifact>.review.md. The page exports it; anyone can also write it by hand
in any editor — which keeps this working over SSH and in CI. Worked example and JSON contract
are in assets/.
<!-- human-gate:v1 target=plan.md round=1 -->
reviewer: reza
## BLOCKER b2
> We expect a 40% lift in activation.
No source, and it drives the whole plan. Cite it or cut it.
Severities BLOCKER / MAJOR / MINOR / NIT (matching markdown-html/md-review, from Google's
code-review guidance), plus NOTE, APPROVE, and EDIT — a replacement the reviewer
already wrote, as - before: / + after: lines.
Gate rules
| Refuses to close when | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| G1 | no round collected | G4 | sidecar changed after the last collect |
| G2 | a BLOCKER or MAJOR is open | G5 | round cap exhausted → escalate, never pass |
| G3 | no named reviewer | G6 | waiver used without a recorded reason |
| G7 | the round carries unresolved integrity problems — a mistyped severity silently downgrades to NIT, so a real blocker can be lost to a typo |
Overrides must be explicit — close plan.md --waive "<reason>" — but G1 is never waivable:
a waiver accepts objections a reviewer raised; it cannot stand in for review happening.
Hard rules
- Never report done while
closeexits 2. Say what is open instead. - Never invent a reviewer name to satisfy G3. No reviewer is the finding.
- Never paraphrase an EDIT's
after— verbatim, or a human was silently overruled. Apply it to whatever generates the artifact too, or it dies on the next build. - Never block-poll for a human. Hand over the path and end the turn;
opendetects a headless host. Rounds are capped and exhaustion escalates. - Never auto-fetch and run unpinned code. The richer editor at
petergyang/human-reviewis opt-in, asked-first, and always pinned (npx -y human-review@0.6.0) — unpinnednpx -yruns whatever was published most recently. Itspollblocks and it rewrites HTML in place, so wrap both. It changes the editor, never the gate. Seeaudit/human-review-2026-08/. - Never treat the review page as source of truth. It is a viewing surface.
Forcing questions
One at a time when scope is fuzzy: Who, by name, signs off? · What would make them reject it outright? (name it before reading — Klein's pre-mortem) · Is this reversible? (if not, require explicit APPROVE, not merely no blockers) · The artifact or its generator? (both) · How many rounds is this worth? · Is a human available now? (if not, hand over and stop). Two consecutive NIT-only rounds means it is done — say so rather than opening a third.
Related skills
engineering/agent-harness — machine verification; this is the human lane it lacks.
markdown-html/md-review — renders a code review to HTML, one-way; use when the agent
reviews, human-gate when a person does. engineering/grill-me — interrogates a plan before
an artifact exists. content-humanizer/behuman — human voice, not approval.
Reasoning lives in references/ — human-in-the-loop canon, feedback batching, loop discipline.
Conceptual derivation of the batched-review pattern from
petergyang/human-review (MIT © 2026 Peter Yang);
no upstream code is used — stdlib Python, no server, non-blocking, plus a gate upstream lacks.