I Made My AI Agent Ask Permission Before Spending or Sending Anything. By Day 3 I Was Ready to Remove It.

Description and use

A developer built an approval workflow for an AI agent, tiering actions by risk and requiring human approval only for high‑risk operations, reducing errors and duplicate charges.

Problem

Agents performed risky actions (payments, emails, deployments) without human oversight, leading to duplicate charges and potential misuse.

Outcome

The redesigned approval system reduced daily approval requests from ~47 to ~6, eliminated duplicate charges, and prevented unauthorized actions while maintaining operational flow.

Workflow

• Define risky tools and tiering logic based on tool and payload.
• When a risky tool is invoked, call request_approval to log the action and notify the owner.
• For Tier 1 actions, execute immediately without notification.
• For Tier 2 actions, enqueue the call with a 10‑minute delay and run a secondary LLM pass to flag potential issues; if flagged, promote to Tier 3.
• For Tier 3 actions, wait for human approval via a mobile interface; include a diff‑style summary and agent’s reasoning.
• Set a 4‑hour expiry on pending approvals that defaults to deny and triggers a customer follow‑up message.
• Batch Tier 3 approvals into a twice‑daily digest to reduce friction.
• Ensure the agent’s payload contains evidence (order ID, email thread, amount) to justify irreversible actions.
• Reject any Tier 3 action lacking verifiable evidence.
• Update the agent loop to handle approval responses and proceed accordingly.

Evidence

I had rebuilt the exact problem I was trying to solve — just with extra steps.

Source

The agent must argue its case. The approval payload includes the agent's reasoning and the specific evidence it used.

Source