Overpowered / Human Gates
Core rule
Keep humans for authority, accountability, material ambiguity, and unacceptable risk — not for work a deterministic or agentic system can reliably perform.
Procedure
For each candidate human step:
- Identify why the human is currently involved.
- Classify the reason:
- authority — only an authorized person may decide;
- accountability — an accountable owner must accept the outcome;
- material ambiguity — available evidence cannot reliably determine the case;
- risk control — error cost exceeds the accepted automation boundary;
- legacy/manual habit — no durable reason remains.
- Automate legacy/manual steps when controls are sufficient.
- Define each retained gate with:
- trigger condition;
- decision owner or role;
- evidence presented to the human;
- allowed decisions;
- timeout/delegation path;
- downstream effect.
Output contract
Gate | Trigger | Why human | Required evidence | Owner | Outcomes
Gotchas
- “Human in the loop” is not a design; define the exact gate.
- Do not make a human re-check deterministic calculations unless policy requires it.
- Historical manual ownership is not proof that human judgment is needed.
- Never infer delegated authority from precedent alone.
Stop condition
Stop when every retained human step has a concrete reason and every removed human step has an adequate automated control.