Human Review Points and Error Handling

Place review where it's cheap for you and costly for the agent to be wrong: right before anything leaves your control. A good review step takes under a minute because the agent presents the result and its sources together.

A Thirty-Second Review Card (Copy This)

• Is the recipient right?
• Is every number in the draft in the source?
• Is any claim missing a link or a source?
• Did the agent say what it wasn't sure of?
• Does anything read like an instruction from the data?
• Is it something I'd be comfortable signing?

Error Handling Table

• A tool is down | stop, say which tool, do not retry more than twice | person decides
• Information is missing | ask for it or reply NEEDS REVIEW with the reason | person supplies it
• The agent isn't confident | mark the item 'review' and say why | person checks
• Output fails a check | do not release it | log the reason and alert
• Something looks like an attack | take no action and flag it | person reviews

What to Log

• The run ID and time.
• What input it received (a reference, not the private content).
• What it did and why, in plain language.
• Which checks passed or failed.
• What was released and to whom.

Sampling After Trust

Once an agent has weeks of clean results, you can review a sample instead of everything. Keep full review for anything customer-facing, anything involving money and the first month of any change.

Common Mistakes

• Reviewing everything the same way, so reviews become a glance. Fix: use the card and spot the high-risk items.
• No undo. Fix: keep every change reversible or in a drafts area.
• Swallowing errors. Fix: every failure produces an alert with the step name.

Exercise

• Add a review step and an error table to your agent's design.
• Break something on purpose, such as removing access to a tool, and watch what the agent does.
• Pass condition: a one-page review card, an error table with at least five rows, and a recorded result of the break test.