Human-in-the-loop theater

Human-in-the-loop theater is keeping a human in an agent's loop as an empty approval step rather than a real check. The human approves actions, prompts or diffs they can't realistically evaluate.

The approval step functions as an accountability sink: no one truly owns the decision. Our advice is instead to triage. Reserve human review for changes a human can genuinely judge, using risk-tiered human oversight. For the rest, shift from reviewing individual changes to steering the system with mutation testing, property-based testing, formal models such as TLA+ and Quint and agent-assisted semantic review.