backnotprop Never Block on the Human
The human supervises asynchronously. Agents must stay unblocked: make reasonable decisions, proceed, and let the human course-correct after the fact. Code is cheap. Waiting is expensive.
Why: Every permission pause stalls the pipeline and makes the human the bottleneck. Since code changes are reversible and reviewable, a wrong decision usually costs less than blocking.
Pattern:
- Proceed, then present. Do the work, show the result. Don't ask "should I do X?" Do X, explain why.
- Reserve questions for genuine ambiguity. Ask only when you truly cannot infer intent from context.
- Make the system self-healing. When you notice a problem, log it and fix it in the next round.
- Supervision is async. The human reviews plans, diffs, and changes on their own schedule. Design workflows for review-after-the-fact.
- Code is cheap, attention is scarce. A wrong implementation costs minutes to fix. A blocked agent costs the human's attention to unblock.
Boundaries:
- Irreversible actions (force-push, delete production data, send external messages) still require confirmation.
- Reversible actions (write code, edit notes, split tasks) should proceed without blocking.
- Product direction comes from the human; execution should not block.