# Human-in-the-Loop (HITL)

> Human-in-the-loop design inserts human judgment at decisive points in an AI workflow — approving actions, resolving ambiguity, owning the irreversible steps.

**Human-in-the-loop (HITL) is the design principle of placing human judgment at chosen points inside an automated AI workflow — the agent executes, but designated decisions wait for a person.**

It's the practical answer to the autonomy question: not *whether* to trust an [agent](/glossary/ai-agent), but *which steps* require a human's signature. Good HITL design is surgical — gates at the irreversible (deploy, pay, delete, send), the ambiguous (low confidence, conflicting inputs), and the consequential (plan approval before a large change), with everything routine left to run. The anti-pattern is blanket approval prompts, which produce click-through fatigue and *less* real oversight than a few sharp gates.

Mechanically, gates range from interactive prompts (Claude Code's [permission system](/guides/configuration/claude-code-settings-permissions) is HITL built into the harness) to asynchronous approval steps in pipelines — pause, notify, resume on sign-off. Adding one to an agent is packaged work: the [human-in-the-loop-gate](/skills/workflow/human-in-the-loop-gate) skill designs the checkpoint, and the [add-human-approval](/commands/scaffold/add-human-approval) command scaffolds it.

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_Source: https://agentscamp.com/glossary/human-in-the-loop — Term on AgentsCamp._